Almost everyone is familiar with O’Henry’s classic short story, The Gift of the Magi, published in 1905. This is the story of a young married couple who have little money. With Christmas approaching, Della, the wife, hopes to buy her husband, Jim, a new watch chain for the gold pocket-watch he inherited from his father. However, after shopping all day she can find nothing that she can afford. At the end of the day on Christmas Eve, she has an idea. Della goes to a hairdresser and sells her long, thick locks for twenty dollars. She uses the money to buy her husband a platinum watch chain. Jim arrives home from work on Christmas Eve, and is shocked to see that Della is completely shorn. He shows her what he has bought her that day as a Christmas gift: a pair of expensive ivory combs to hold up her beautiful hair. Struggling not to cry, Della presents him with the watch chain, explaining that she sold her hair in order to afford this gift. Jim is then forced to show her that he no longer has his watch. He sold it in order to buy the combs.

This story fascinates me for how much power is packed in its simplicity. The story’s plot, and indeed its larger theme, revolve around and are evoked by this pair of specific objects: the watch chain and the hair combs. Individually, Della and Jim value two things: she is proud of her lustrous hair, and he treasures his gold watch. By sacrificing these objects with the intention of pleasing their beloved, they reveal a more valuable – indeed, priceless – commodity which they already possess. It is their love for each other.

The importance of intentionally placed objects in fiction cannot be underestimated. In certain genre forms of storytelling which borrow from myths, like fantasy, horror, or science fiction, “magical” objects loom large. Think of Superman’s kryptonite, or the ring Bilbo Baggins gives to Frodo, sending him and his fellow hobbits on their long, dangerous mission to Rivendell.

In realistic literary fiction, however, objects rarely possess magical powers. Instead, they sometimes function as receptacles of meaning and significance. They serve as symbols. When used in this way, I tend to think of these items as “sacred” objects, not in the religious sense but as something “dedicated or devoted to a single use, purpose or person.”

I refer fairly often to Melville’s MOBY DICK when writing about fiction, because it has so many teachable elements. It is also the first novel I think of when citing the effective use of sacred objects. Of course, the Pequod itself functions as a powerful symbol of the American republic. The whaling ship hosts a crazily diverse world of men drawn from the four corners of the world for the sake of profit and adventure, men whose destiny is tied to the reckless will of their leader, Captain Ahab. It is a ship that trades in death: butchering and boiling untold numbers of whales on the blood-drenched decks while it sails inexorably towards its own destruction.

But I am thinking of a more personal object that resonates deeply within the story, one that both foretells the novel’s end and conveys the novel’s message, symbolically. This is the casket-canoe built by the ship’s carpenter for the indigenous harpooner, Queequeg, when he falls ill with fever and believes he will die. As soon as the coffin is completed and Queequeg lies in it for the first time, he begins to feel his health returning. At one point in the voyage when the ship loses its life-preserver, along with one of its sailors, Queequeg offers his coffin as a replacement. The carpenter resists out of superstitious horror: “Sailing about with a graveyard-tray!” he objects. But since Ahab is in a frenzy to capture and kill Moby Dick, there is no time to fashion an alternative. The coffin is nailed shut, caulked, covered in pitch to make it watertight and hung from the stern to replace the missing life-buoy.

The irony of this is lost on no one, especially not the reader, and not when Ahab himself calls our attention to it, crying: “Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further?”

It does. Only thirty pages later the novel concludes with the sinking of the Pequod by the white whale. Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick leads to his annihilation and his crew’s, with the drowning of all souls, save one. Ishmael, the narrator, is left clinging to wreckage after the ship is sucked down in a vortex of destruction, and watches as Queequeg’s coffin, torn loose from its tether, shoots to the surface of the sea. “Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night,” the sailor floats alone on the vast Pacific before being rescued by a passing ship. The message is clear: Ishmael’s name in Hebrew means “God listens.” As the sole witness to these terrible events, surviving atop his dead friend’s casket, Ishmael is enjoined to set down the story of Ahab’s disastrous, monomaniacal ambition, and of how it has led to the Pequod’s fatal reckoning with Moby Dick.

I think I must have been subconsciously holding Queequeg’s coffin in my mind when I wrote THE SECOND MRS. HOCKADAY, my novel set in upstate South Carolina during the second half of the Civil War (Algonquin 2017). The most important sacred object in the novel is the copy of DAVID COPPERFIELD which falls into the protagonist’s hands, and which young Placidia Hockaday converts into a diary, in this period of severe paper shortages in the south, by writing on the blank backs of the illustrations. The diary plays a key part in reconciling Placidia Hockaday with her husband after he returns to the farm from an officer’s prison in 1865, and exerts powerful, transformative influence on her adult son in the following generation.

However, Dickens’ novel does not borrow from Melville’s masterpiece. The sacred object I employed to convey the legacy handed down at Holland Creek from one woman to the next is the sewing box that belonged to Placidia’s predecessor, the first Mrs. Hockaday, who has died of typhoid fever prior to the novel’s start and has left her infant son to be raised by her husband, Gryffth. (The internet is the researcher’s friend: I discovered in searching auction sites online that antebellum-era sewing boxes were larger than more modern ones, and often personalized by the owner in some way that displayed her mastery as a seamstress, as well as, in Janet Hockaday’s case, her piety.)

Placidia discovers the sewing box by accident while managing their farm in Gryffth’s absence. When she later testifies at the inquest into the death of the child she conceived in her husband’s absence, and who died shortly after being born, she says, “I was too ill to leave my bed but I requested that the baby be wrapped in a piece of my knitting and interred in the sewing box that belonged to the first Mrs. Hockaday, as I could not bear for him to go into the next life unaccompanied by any mementoes of loving attachment in this one.”

In this way, the ebony-wood box with the Bible verse stitched into the lid carries more than the remains of an unlucky and illegitimate infant. It also serves to connect these two women who never met but who loved the same man and nurtured the same child; it tangibly symbolizes their sacrifices in a war-torn world.

In thinking of your favorite novels, can you pick out sacred or magical objects that play important roles in the story? If you take a closer look, you will likely discover that these objects are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to conveying that all-important message.