It’s easy not even to notice personification — anthropomorphism is so often our default setting that many instances of it have become hackneyed or banal: winds whispering in the trees, windows overlooking gardens.
In today’s passage from Daughter of Earth (pp. 143-149), there are several striking instances of personification that heighten the reader’s attention to important moments. Marie goes out into the desert to ponder a big decision, whether to go east to help her brothers or west to follow her infatuation with Knut and Karin. “The hours walked and I walked with them.” And later, when Marie has opted to go west and then, against her hard-fought principles, capitulated to the urge to marry Knut, Smedley shows Marie’s disassociation from herself and her own choice by personifying her voice as she seals her vow: “‘Yes, I guess so.’—Was that my voice marrying me like this!”
Take a look at your own work and see if you can root out or freshen up any clichéed instances. Then think about how weird and wonderful personification can be at its best — such as the animated fixtures and objects of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast that dovetail so intriguingly with the questions about what constitutes humanity raised by the beast’s dual nature.
Are there interesting personifications you could inject or amplify in your work in order to emphasize your underlying ideas or imagery?