The English word "personification" did not exist prior to the late seventeenth century. It derives from the French verb personnifier which Boileau coined in his Eleventh Reflection on Longinus (Haworth 43). Boileau used the neologism to exonerate Racine from the charge that the playwright was unappropriately lurid in Theramene's recapitulation of Hyppolyte's death scene at the close of Phedre (v.vi). Boileau's defense was built on the fact that Racine was conveying a moment of sublime sentiment, and, more importantly, that the playwright did not "speak the words himself," using instead Theramene as a verbal mask or representative (Haworth 44). Boileau's inkhorn term conveyed no more than the earliest Hellenic conception of the trope as a means for any dramatic presentation of a speech. The new term proved so potent, apparently, that little more than a century later, another French thinker - Pierre Fontanier - saw the need taxonomically to separate la personnification from la prosopopee. Boileau's successful neolatin coinage, however, carried a new conceptual charge alien to the conservative connotations of the word "prosopopeia." According to Foucault and a number of other contemporary thinkers, the concept of the "person" is an invention of the late seventeenth century (Sexuality 17—47; Rorty 17—69; Zimbardo 1—14; Elliott 3—32; Ginsberg ch. 1). A human person was, for thinkers as varied as Montaigne, Descartes, John Locke, or Theophilus Gale, a rational being constituted by an entirely interior psychology, by a discrete, unique, and private consciousness that functioned as its own mechanism of self-definition and regulation. Boileau's engagement of the French word personne, or rather, of the Latin word persona, latched onto a concurrently evolving sense of what a human being was thought to be. As this book has shown, the figurally invented personages that result from personification are anything but realistic or modern "characters." The latter are fictive and simulational human beings, who, according to Rose Zimbardo, are native to literature only after the late seventeenth century and who possess an "internal arena" of soul and psyche (2). Indeed, Zimbardo holds that no fictional character, prior to the time of the English Restoration, was conceived of as an accurate simulacrum of psychological interiority. Such characters were mere ideational effigies. The seventeenth-century conceptual shift concerning personality and mind punctured old expectations of what literary character could be. The term "personification," by dint of its new connotational force, was therefore at odds with the older conception of "prosopopeia." Although both words etymologically mean "to make a face or mask," "prosopopeia" retained that sense of sheer literary game or artifice. "Personification," on the other hand, could have promoted a deep conceptual confusion about its status and value. Literature and drama became more and more taken up with the mimesis of actual human personality — a conceptual property promised but not delivered by the term "personification." This knot of lexical and conceptual confusion may be concomitant upon the trope's imminent historical decay as a serious and powerful means of poetic invention.
-James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification pages 171-172.
