A term you'll meet in Wagner, music, and literary borrowing.
A leitmotif (German for "leading motif") is a short, recognizable phrase — originally musical, later verbal — that recurs throughout a work and is specifically associated with a particular character, idea, place, or emotion. Every time the leitmotif appears, it brings with it the association built up by its previous appearances. The term comes from Richard Wagner's operas, where it was developed into a structural principle, and was later borrowed into literary criticism to name a similar technique in fiction.
In Wagner's Ring cycle (1869–1876), each major character, object, and concept has an associated musical theme. The "sword motif," the "Valhalla motif," the "Siegfried motif" — each is a brief, distinctive musical phrase. When the orchestra plays these motifs, they signal to the listener what is being referenced, even if no character on stage names it. A character can be deceived about who someone is while the orchestra reveals the truth through the leitmotif.
The technique gave Wagner enormous expressive resources. He could combine motifs to suggest relationships ("Siegfried + sword + Valhalla" producing a complex moment of meaning), modify them to suggest change (a triumphant motif played in a minor key for defeat), or use one motif's appearance to comment ironically on events.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists, many of them deeply influenced by Wagner, adapted the technique. The leitmotif in fiction is a recurring verbal phrase — sometimes a sentence, sometimes just a word or image — that becomes attached to a character or idea and resonates every time it returns.
Joyce in Ulysses uses leitmotifs systematically. Bloom is associated with specific recurring phrases and images; Stephen with others; Molly with still others. The reader gradually learns to recognize each character's verbal signature.
Thomas Mann, an open Wagnerian, uses leitmotif heavily in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus. A particular gesture, an idiom, a physical detail attaches to a character and recurs across hundreds of pages, each return enriched by all the previous ones.
The terms overlap but are not identical:
All leitmotifs are motifs; not all motifs are leitmotifs. "Water imagery in The Awakening" is a motif. "The recurring phrase 'I am the very pattern of a modern Major-General' attached to a single character" is closer to a leitmotif.
Leitmotif gives fiction a quasi-musical structure: identifiable themes return, develop, combine, and modulate. The reader's recognition of returning material creates the same satisfaction that recognizing returning themes creates in music. And because each return carries forward all the accumulated meaning of previous appearances, a leitmotif can do enormous emotional work in very little verbal space — a single phrase, returning at the right moment, can carry hundreds of pages of resonance.
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