The Power of Motifs
By Victoria Fortune
Looking for ways to create deeper resonance in your writing? Consider employing a motif. Motif is a derived from French, meaning “dominant idea or theme.” In the visual arts, motifs are designs that repeat lines, shapes and colors to form patterns. In literature, a motif is a symbol that is repeated throughout a story to help convey a central theme.
A motif can be anything: an object, sound, color, action, geographical feature, place, etc. Some examples of famous literary motifs include the green light across the bay in The Great Gatsby, which symbolizes the American dream--a beacon of hope, yet artificial and forever in the distance, out of reach. Another is light and dark in Romeo and Juliet. Light is continually used to describe the love of the couple for one another (“What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”) and darkness casts gloom on scenes highlighting hate and death. These elements are used to create mood and atmosphere as well as underscore themes.
The most powerful motifs draw on elements that already carry symbolic meaning in most readers’ minds. Light has positive connotations, like hope, knowledge and joy, while darkness carries negative connotations, such as evil, ignorance, and despair. Utilizing motifs allows a writer to draw on such associations to affect the reader’s perceptions and emotions. For example, the light in The Great Gatsby is green, a color associated with wealth as well as greed and envy, providing Fitzgerald with a means to evoke these ideas in the reader’s mind without having to mention them overtly.
Elements of nature make powerful motifs because they are so rich with associations in the human psyche. Nature’s patterns are not only all around us, they are within us as well as. The spiral of the milky way resembles the whorl of a fingerprint. The branching of a river resembles a network of veins. Utilizing natural elements as motifs can be a powerful way to evoke meaning and connect with the reader on a deeper level.
One of my favorite works of literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, utilizes the motif of a tree to symbolize the main character’s desires. Let’s look at how this motif is revisited throughout the book:
Chapter two begins: “Janie saw her life, like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.” (8) Janie’s awakening begins beneath “a blossoming pear tree. . . . It stirred her tremendously.” (10) Here Hurston establishes the pear tree and plants in bloom as a symbol of Janie’s yearning to live life fully and deeply.
When Janie has her first kiss (under the pear tree), her grandmother sees her, and “Nanny’s head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm. Foundation of ancient power that no longer mattered.” (12) Nanny has no patience for Janie’s dreams of love and self-actualization. She maintains the “ancient” view of marriage as a means of security for a woman and marries Janie off to an old farmer who will provide for her, but “the vision of Logan Killicks was desecrating the pear tree.” Not only is their marriage loveless—Janie describes Logan’s home as “a stump in the woods”, i.e. a lifeless tree--but Logan plans to work Janie like a mule.
So, Janie runs off with her second husband, Joe, thinking with him, “she is going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.”(32) He is a wealthy store owner who provides her with status and leisure, but he insists she remain inside the store working, or in their house, where she is safe. She is cut off from nature and nearly loses her sense of self. To her, working at the store is “such a waste of time and life.”
Then she meets her third husband, Teacake, who “could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring.” (106) The motif of the pear tree tells the reader that in Teacake, Janie has finally found love. They spend most of their time outdoors, venturing out even when a hurricane hits, demonstrating that they are unafraid to face life head on, “the things suffered, the things enjoyed.”
When a motif works on multiple levels--telegraphing the inner desires or fears of characters, setting mood, and conveying the theme--it can make the story resonate deeply. Not every story lends itself to the use of motif. If trying to include one feels forced or contrived, then it will seem so to readers, as well. However, if there is an object, sound, image, action, etc., that crops up repeatedly as you draft, that can convey something essential about your protagonist, or that you associate with your themes, look for ways to harness it to layer your story with deeper meaning and resonance.
Photo credit: 626178 © Martin Reed | Dreamstime.com
