What Is a Motif? Meaning in Literature, Examples and How to Use One

A motif is a concrete element that recurs in a story, such as an image, an object, a phrase, a colour or a kind of situation, and gathers meaning each time it comes back. One appearance is a detail. The second and third, changed a little each time, make it a motif, and the pattern usually points towards the story's theme.

The word has a second, older sense in criticism: a type of incident or character that turns up across many different stories, such as the wicked stepmother. This page covers both, with the definitions in their authors' own words, examples checked in the texts, and a method for planting and repeating a motif in your own novel.

What Is the Definition of a Motif?

Dictionaries give the everyday sense first. Merriam-Webster: "a usually recurring salient thematic element (as in the arts) especially : a dominant idea or central theme". Its second sense is the decorative one, "a single or repeated design or color", as in a flower motif on wallpaper. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary gives the literary sense as "a subject, an idea or a phrase that is repeated and developed in a work of literature or a piece of music".

The literary glossaries are more exact, and they show the two senses.

Across many works. Abrams, Thompson and the first half of Baldick describe a motif shared between stories. Abrams's example: "The “loathly lady” who turns out to be a beautiful princess is a common motif in folklore." Baldick's is "The fever that purges away a character's false identity", which he calls "a recurrent motif in Victorian fiction". Thompson, a folklorist, catalogued thousands of these in his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.

Inside one work. The second half of Baldick's definition is the sense most writers mean: something in your book that comes back and grows into a theme. Abrams adds that the term, "or else the German leitmotif (a guiding motif)", is also used for this repetition within a work, "as in the operas of Richard Wagner or in novels by Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner".

The word came into English from French in the mid 19th century. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use to 1848 and gives the pronunciation as mō-ˈtēf (moh-TEEF).

What Is the Difference Between a Motif, a Theme and a Symbol?

These three get swapped constantly. They do different jobs.

Motif vs theme. A theme is an idea and can be written as a sentence, which is how theme in a story is usually defined. A motif is a thing you can point to on the page. Abrams: "Theme is sometimes used interchangeably with “motif,” but the term is more usefully applied" to a general idea the work makes persuasive. The motif is evidence. The theme is the verdict.

Motif vs symbol. A symbol can do its work in a single appearance. A motif needs repetition. Many motifs are symbolic, and a recurring symbol is a motif, but a symbol that appears once is not.

Motif vs leitmotif. In music a leitmotif is a recurring phrase tied to a character or idea. In criticism the two words now overlap, and Abrams treats leitmotif as the within-one-work kind of motif.

What Are Some Examples of Motifs in Literature?

Each of these was checked in the text itself, not in a study guide.

Blood on the hands in Macbeth. Straight after the murder, Macbeth asks: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" (Act 2, Scene 2). Lady Macbeth answers in the same scene: "A little water clears us of this deed". By Act 5, Scene 1 she is sleepwalking and rubbing her hands: "Out, damned spot!" and "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." The motif comes back reversed. The water that was going to clear them cannot.

The stopped clocks in Great Expectations. In Chapter 8, Pip notices that Miss Havisham's "watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine." In Chapter 11 the clock on the outer wall has stopped at the same time. Only in Chapter 22 does Herbert explain: the letter breaking off her marriage arrived "At the hour and minute ... at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks." Dickens plants the image, repeats it, and explains it fourteen chapters later.

The green light in The Great Gatsby. Nick first sees Gatsby stretching his arms towards "a single green light, minute and far away" (Chapter 1). In Chapter 5, with Daisy beside him, "the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. ... Now it was again a green light on a dock." The novel's last page returns to it: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us."

The little phrase in Proust. E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel (1927), uses the "little phrase" of Vinteuil's sonata in In Search of Lost Time as his model. It first attends Swann's love for Odette, then his jealousy, and hundreds of pages later it recurs in a different piece of music, "half heard, changed, but giving complete orientation".

What Makes a Motif Work?

Forster's answer is the best short account of the craft. He calls the effect rhythm and defines it as "repetition plus variation".

He contrasts it with what he calls a banner: George Meredith's "double-blossomed cherry tree to accompany Clara Middleton", a tag that appears whenever the character does. "A banner can only reappear, rhythm can develop". The difference is change. A banner means the same thing every time. A motif means something new each time it comes back.

He is just as clear about the failure: "Done badly, rhythm is most boring, it hardens into a symbol and instead of carrying us on it trips us up." His example is "Galsworthy's spaniel John, or whatever it is", which "lies under the feet again". And on spacing: rhythm works "not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope."

What Kinds of Motifs Are There?

• Image or object. The stopped clocks, the green light, a cracked cup.
• Colour. Red in a book about guilt, or white in one about innocence lost.
• Phrase. A line of dialogue that returns in another mouth, with a different meaning.
• Sound or music. Proust's little phrase, church bells, a song on the radio.
• Situation. Meals, journeys, doors closing. Three family dinners, each one tenser than the last.
• Character type (across works). The trickster, the wicked stepmother, the loathly lady. This is the folklorist's sense, and it overlaps with archetypes.

How Do You Use a Motif in a Novel?

1. Find it in the draft first. Most motifs are discovered, not invented. Read the draft and note what already keeps coming back. Your instincts usually chose it for a reason.
2. Choose something concrete. An object or image the reader can see. "Loneliness" is not a motif. An empty second chair is.
3. Tie it to the theme. The motif should sit where the book's central question lives. If the book is about what we inherit, a motif from the dead parent's house will carry more than the weather.
4. Plant it in an ordinary moment. The first appearance should look like plain description. Pip only notices the clocks while he avoids Miss Havisham's eyes.
5. Repeat it at turning points. Bring it back where the story changes, not on a schedule. Three to five strong appearances in a novel are worth more than twenty weak ones.
6. Change it every time. Forster's rule. Each return should show the character, or the reader, seeing it differently. Lady Macbeth's water becomes the thing that cannot wash.
7. Never explain it in a character's mouth. Let the reader make the link. Herbert explains why the clocks stopped, not what they mean.
8. Give it a last appearance. The final return should land on the climax or the ending, where it carries the theme with no help.

A motif works alongside other kinds of setup. Where foreshadowing hints at a future event, a motif builds meaning through recurrence, and an object that must eventually be used belongs under Chekhov's gun instead.

A Worked Example

Mira grows up in a fishing village. Her father was lost at sea when she was twelve, and at thirty she has come back to sell his boat. The book's theme: grief turns into belonging once you stop running from it. The motif is salt.

1. Chapter 1, planted. She wakes in her father's house to salt dried white on the window. She cannot see the harbour through it, and she does not wipe it off.
2. Chapter 4, repeated. Her aunt bakes the bread her father liked, crusted with sea salt. Mira says she is not hungry and leaves it on the plate.
3. Chapter 9, changed. Out on the boat in a squall, helping the buyer's son bring it in, she tastes salt on her lips and laughs for the first time in the book.
4. Chapter 14, last appearance. She wipes the window clean with her sleeve, sees the harbour, and tears up the sale agreement.

Nobody says "grief" or "belonging". The salt goes from a barrier, to something refused, to something tasted, to something cleared away, and that change is the theme.

How Do You Track a Motif in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Codex keeps reference entries beside the manuscript and finds every place an entry's name is used, so a motif can have an entry of its own, with a list of every chapter where it appears.

1. Open the Codex from its button in the menu bar. At the bottom of its sidebar, click New category, type "Motifs" under Name, pick an icon and click Create category.
2. In the new Motifs category, click the + (New entry) and choose Blank.
3. Name the entry after the motif's main word ("salt"). In the line under the name ("One line: who or what this is"), write what it stands for in this book: "Grief at first, then home."
4. Under Also called, add the other words you use for it, such as "salted" or "brine". Names are matched as whole words, so each form you want counted needs its own alias.
5. In Description, list each planned appearance and how it changes: barrier, refused, tasted, cleared.
6. As you write, the name and its aliases are underlined in your chapters. When you revise, open the entry and click its Mentions tab. It lists every chapter that names the motif in manuscript order, with a count and a bar for each. Click a chapter to open it at the first mention.
7. Read down the list. Long gaps show where the motif has been forgotten, and a chapter with a high count shows where it is being leaned on too hard.

If a common word turns up in another sense ("salt of the earth"), the entry's Tracking tab has Not this entry for phrases that hold the name but mean something else, one per line. For a one-off check of a word with no entry, Search Project in the menu bar (Ctrl+Shift+F, or Cmd+Shift+F on a Mac) searches every document, with a Whole Word option. The same Codex holds the rest of a book's reference material, as what to include in a story bible sets out.

Common Mistakes

• Calling one appearance a motif. Without repetition it is a symbol or a detail.
• Repeating without changing. Forster's banner. If the motif means the same in Chapter 20 as in Chapter 1, it has become a tag.
• Overdoing it. Galsworthy's spaniel under the feet again. A reader who sees the motif coming will start counting instead of reading.
• Confusing it with the theme. "Isolation" is a theme topic. The fogged window is the motif that shows it.
• Explaining it. A character who says "the salt was like my grief" has done the reader's work for them.
• Choosing it from a list of examples. Borrowed motifs (doves, storms, mirrors) arrive carrying other books' meanings. One that grows out of your setting belongs to your book alone.
• Saying the green light runs all through Gatsby. It is named in three chapters: the first, the fifth and the last. Its power comes from spacing, not frequency.
• Crediting Wagner with the word "leitmotif". The word was in print by 1871, from the critic F. W. Jähns writing about Weber, and spread through Hans von Wolzogen's 1876 guide to the Ring. Wagner preferred other terms.

Sources

Retrieved 1 November 2026.

• Merriam-Webster, "motif": senses 1 and 2, first known use 1848, pronunciation.
• Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, "motif": literary sense, word origin mid 19th century, from French.
• M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed. (Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), "Motif and Theme" (archive.org).
• Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford University Press, 2008), "motif" (archive.org).
• Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1946), p. 415 (archive.org).
• Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (Simon and Schuster, 1946), the premise of Macbeth (archive.org).
• E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), ch. VIII, "Pattern and Rhythm" (Project Gutenberg).
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2.2 and 5.1 (Project Gutenberg).
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861), chapters 8, 11 and 22 (Project Gutenberg).
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), chapters 1, 5 and 9 (Project Gutenberg).
• "Leitmotif", Wikipedia, for Jähns (1871), Wolzogen's 1876 guide and Wagner's own terms, citing Grove Music Online. Not checked against Grove itself.