Personification Examples in Short Stories: 6 Things Given a Will of Their Own
Quick answer: Personification examples from Poe, Wilde, Crane, Gilman, Gogol and Andersen: houses that watch, a death that walks, a wallpaper that plots, a sea that does not care.
Personification gives a non-human thing human qualities: a house that watches, a wind that mutters, a death that attends a party. In a short story it does two jobs at once. It sharpens the picture, and it tells the reader how the viewpoint character is projecting onto the world. When a narrator says the wallpaper is plotting, we learn more about the narrator than the paper.
Six things given a will of their own
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe ends with the plague itself arriving as a masked guest, tall and gaunt, shrouded like a corpse, walking through the coloured rooms while the revellers shrink from it. Poe's final line gives the Red Death dominion over all, a monarch's word for a disease. The personification is the story's argument: you cannot lock the door on it.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe treats the mansion as a face, its windows vacant and eye-like, its fissure a wound running from roof to tarn. Roderick believes the stones are sentient. By the end, when the house splits and sinks, the reader has been prepared to see a body die.
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde makes a gilded statue weep, speak and give away his jewels, while a swallow carries out his wishes and a reed is courted and abandoned. Wilde uses full personification, the fairy tale kind, so that a city's cruelty can be seen by something that never blinks.
The Open Boat by Stephen Crane personifies in order to deny. The men want nature to have a face so they can curse it; Crane gives them a wind tower that stands with its back turned, indifferent, like a giant ignoring ants. The device is used and then taken away, and that removal is the story's cold centre.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman has the pattern stare, lurch, strangle and creep. The narrator credits the paper with intentions and, eventually, with a prisoner inside it. Every human quality she gives the paper is one she has lost the right to exercise herself.
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol goes further than metaphor: Major Kovalyov's nose leaves his face, puts on a uniform, rides in a carriage and prays in the Kazan Cathedral, outranking its owner. Gogol plays the personification dead straight and lets the bureaucracy's absurdity do the rest.
How to use it in your own story
Personification should tell the reader who is looking. Decide whether the human quality belongs to the world or to the mind observing it, and keep the answer consistent.
Common mistakes
The commonest is habit personification, where every object in a paragraph sighs, glares or beckons and the effect is a nursery rather than a mood. A second is inconsistency of scale: a narrator who personifies the sea in one line and reports it as blank water in the next without any change in mind. A third is the sentimental payoff, where the personified object is asked to deliver the story's moral aloud.
Where readers meet it today
Modern readers will meet the device in Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, where a house keeps talking after its family is gone, in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, in Ted Hughes's How the Whale Became and in George Saunders's Fox 8.
What writers can take from this
- Decide whether the world is alive or the character thinks it is, and stay consistent.
- Prefer a personifying verb to a personifying adjective.
- Once per object; do not make the furniture chatter.
- Let the personification reveal the observer, not just decorate the observed.
- Try denying it: a world that refuses to have a face can be colder than one that glares.
Try it yourself
Write a 500-word story told from inside an empty house on the day its family moves out. The house may notice, remember and prefer, but it may not speak, and it may not be sad in any sentence that uses the word 'sad'.
Questions
What is an example of personification in a short story?
In Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, the plague arrives as a gaunt masked guest who walks through the ballroom, and the final line gives it dominion over everyone present. A disease is treated as a monarch.
How do you identify personification?
Look for a non-human thing performing a human action or holding a human feeling: a house that watches, wallpaper that plots, a wind that complains. Then ask whether the story means it literally, as a fairy tale does, or as the character's projection.
Is personification the same as anthropomorphism?
They overlap. Anthropomorphism usually means a creature or object behaving fully as a human, like Wilde's talking statue; personification can be a single line giving a thing one human trait.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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