In the film adaptation of one of my favorite novels, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, there is a scene in which Lily, the main character, reaches to touch the heart carved into a wooden Black Madonna, a ship’s masthead that figures prominently into the story.

The screen fills with Lily’s out-stretched fingers, trembling toward the blue-clothed breast of the Black Madonna. Beyond, in perfect parallel, we see the unfocused shape of another woman’s breast, beneath a blue dress. It almost looks like they are one and the same, or at least two versions of the same thing.

If you don’t notice the juxtaposition, it doesn’t much matter. You’ll still come away having enjoyed a great film. You might tell a few friends how funny and sad it was, what fabulous casting, how grown up Dakota Fanning is getting to be.

But if you notice this one quiet detail, the film may stick with you for weeks, while you ponder how a certain family of women functions in the life of a motherless girl. Beyond that, you’ll consider how we may best care for ourselves and for others, and how we need women to use that mother-part of themselves to find new ways of nurturing and caring in the wide world beyond our families.

Ernest Hemingway once groused about reviewers who claimed to find deep meanings in his novel, The Old Man and the Sea:

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man.. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.”

Sound like anyone you know?

He was wrong, though. He may not have intentionally put symbols into his work – in fact, non-intentionality helps a writer to keep a properly light touch in such things. But they will still creep in, for the same reason they creep into your dreams. Symbolism is wired into us. On a conscious level, we think with words, but beneath that, in our deepest selves, we think – and communicate – in symbols.

Ever visit a website where little surprises are hidden to be found by your wandering mouse? They’re called Easter eggs. To me, such things as the scene I described above are like Easter eggs – they enhance my enjoyment of the story.

But symbolism isn’t the only kind of “Easter egg.” My co-blogger, Latayne Scott, embedded the end of TS Elliot’s poem, The Hollow Men, into the stunning conclusion of her novel, Latter Day Cypher.

In A Conspiracy of Breath, an as-yet unpublished novel she recently finished which imagines that a woman might have written The Book of Hebrews (itself in great part a treatise on the symbology of the Old Testament), Latayne hid an ancient form of poetry in a crucial scene:

“I tried to use allusions to the classical Greek and Roman culture that would have influenced Priscilla, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, to express herself as she did. One literary technique I used was to structure a scene — actually a childbirth scene– using an ancient Hebrew structure called a chiasmus. The elements of the scene took this form: ABCDEF G FEDCBA. (If you will closely notice Hebrew poetry it often reflects chiasmus.)”

Esoteric stuff, perhaps. But you needn’t know the ancient Hebrew forms to enjoy the fact that the birthing comes to us as a massive wave of sensations and meaning. The form is something you find in text books, but the thing itself is something you feel in your bones.

And that’s the purpose of hidden things in stories: to make you feel something beyond words.

I invite you to recall, in your comments, “Easter eggs” you have found in novels or films that spoke to you more deeply than the more visible part of the story.

And this weekend, if you’re going to watch a film, why not make it The Secret Life of Bees?

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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