The Rules of Magic

“Susanna Owens spoke in riddles and never gave a straight answer. Uncross your knives, she’d insist if there was a quarrel at the table. Butter melting in a dish meant someone nearby was in love, and a bird in the house could take your bad luck out the window. She insisted that her children wear blue for protection and carry packets of lavender in their pockets.”

Although Susanna Owens has renounced her magical heritage, she cannot help drawing upon superstitions in her family of origin that make her seem the opposite of the rational woman she is with her husband. This suggests that Susanna is conflicted about her identity and is in a state of self-denial. All her beliefs have the character of housewifely superstitions, given their agrarian nature, and link her habits to those of Aunt Isabelle.

“Beware of love, Maria Owens had written on the first page of her journal. Know that for our family, love is a curse.”

This quote from Maria Owens’s journal establishes the family’s belief in their bad luck around love. Given that Maria is their most important ancestor, the apparition of this prohibition in her journal has a biblical quality and the power to influence the family into adopting her beliefs.

“The sisters were at the edge of the pond when lightning struck, but even before the incandescent bolts illuminated the sky, Franny could smell sulfur. The boys were hit in an instant. They stumbled as if shot, then fell shuddering to the ground. Blue smoke rose from their fallen bodies.”

The dramatic nature of the death of the boys Frances and Jet date in Massachusetts illustrates the power of the curse affecting the Owens family. The elemental components of lightning, a sulfur smell, and blue smoke create pathetic fallacy and make it seem as though the boys have been struck down by an evil spell. This ought to be warning enough for the girls to not get involved with anyone else.

“As for Franny, she wanted what she most often experienced in her dreams. To be among the birds. She preferred them to most human beings, their grace, their distance from the earth, their great beauty. Perhaps that was why they always came to her. In some way, she spoke their language.”

Frances’s affinity with birds affirms that she is a magical being, while her admiration of their distance from the earth alludes to her wishes for freedom and escape from her present circumstances. Still, although she speaks their language, her admiration of them is very much from the perspective of a human.

“She can be cautious now if that’s what she wants, but as far as I can tell, love is like a train that will keep going at full speed whether you like it or not, so you may as well enjoy the ride.”

April opines that falling in love is inevitable, regardless of the precautions one takes against it. The simile of the full-speed train alludes to the inexorableness of love. However, it also foreshadows the traffic accident that will destroy Jet’s lover and her parents.

“He experienced the future not as a panoramic vista but as bits and pieces, like a living crazy quilt. It was becoming more difficult for him to deny what he saw. A man standing on a hillside in California in a field of yellow grass. A street in Paris, A girl with gray eyes. A cemetery filled with angels. A door he’d have to open in order to walk through.”

Vincent is uncomfortable with his psychic gift, which enables him to see into the future. The “bits and pieces” of visions that he sees make his foresight analogous to memory, which is not continuous or chronological but triggered by different stimuli. Still, the vividness of the visions makes him believe in them, and sure enough, he has a premonition of William, his daughter, Regina, and the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where he will be buried and end his first life.

“Just across from the Plaza Hotel the taxi skidded out of control. Birds in the trees took flight and filled the ember sky. Levi leapt in front of Jet as the taxi came barreling onto the sidewalk. Time slowed so that she could see his eyes dilate when he realized what was happening. It was so very slow they might have been caught in a glass jar.”

The moments that prefigure Levi’s death seem to be in slow motion for both him and Jet. This torturous delay creates suspense and allows them to recognize that the Owens curse seems to be in action. The imagery of seeing eyes dilate and being caught in a glass jar signifies entrapment and no way to escape from fate. The filling of the sky with birds indicates an omen from the natural world and creates pathetic fallacy for the tragedy that will follow.

“There was no way to hide the wound on Jet’s face, though Franny tried with some powder from one of their mother’s gold compacts. It looked as though blue flowers had been stamped on Jet’s skin. Even when it healed, a jagged line would run down one side of her face.”

The intensity and permanence of Jet’s scar is a metaphor for her inability to get over Levi, who was her one true love. While Jet feels that she has been rightly disfigured by the scar, which is a representation of her guilt for falling in love with Levi in the first place, the image of blue flowers is an attractive one and indicates the promise of something beautiful to come from her suffering.

“She made good with what she had. A branch from an ash tree in Washington Square Park, two dappled feathers of a nesting dove on West Fourth Street, leaves from the wavering lilacs in their yard. The result was grittier than Aunt Isabelle’s recipe, with more intensity. Wash with it, and not only were you beautiful, you were ready to do battle. It was especially good for anyone riding the subway or walking down a dark street after midnight.”

This is one of many passages that explores the theme of the magical potential within the urban landscape of New York City. As she makes Aunt Isabelle’s complexion-preserving black soap, Frances takes advantage of the scrappy nature she finds in their city. Fittingly, the strength-giving properties of the result make it uniquely New York and fitting for the lifestyle of its inhabitants. The adaptability of the soap recipe is a metaphor for the adaptability of the Owenses, who can thrive in all environments.

“These were the times when children dreamed about nuclear testing and fallen stars. There was an undercurrent of unrest, like a wave, racial division in the cities, the war halfway around the world blooming with blood. When Vincent walked through Washington Square Park he could hear the thoughts of the people he passed by, such a ragged outcry of emotion he sometimes thought he would go mad.”

This passage situates the novel firmly in the technological and political ferment of the 1960s. The elemental imagery of an “undercurrent” or “wave” of unrest has the all-consuming quality of magic and so links the Owenses’ world to the zeitgeist. Still, the visceral, corporeal images of a world blooming with blood or ragged emotional outcries also signify a sense of collective overwhelm and destructiveness. Vincent, who feels that he may go mad, has wholly absorbed the spirit of the times.

“It happened the way things happen in a dream. A door opens, a person calls your name, your heart beats faster, and everything is familiar, yet you don’t know where you are. You are falling, you’re in a house you don’t recognize and yet you want to be here, you have actually wanted to be here all of your life.”

Hoffman relates Vincent’s experience of falling in love in the second person to illustrate how he has shifted from his individual consciousness to a more universal state of collective feeling. The metaphor of a door opening onto a house that is paradoxically both new and familiar indicates that Vincent is both in a new state and returning to himself. He realizes that he has wanted to just be himself for his entire life.

“Oh, fuck it, Franny. Aren’t you sick of being ruled by the actions of people who are long dead? Maybe everyone is cursed. Maybe it’s the human condition. Maybe it’s what we want.”

Vincent challenges Frances to think about to what extent she wants the family curse to determine the outcome of her life. The use of the term “long dead” to describe his ancestors indicates how little influence Vincent wants to give them now that he has fallen in love. Seeking to put distance between himself and the curse, he argues that the Owenses are no different from others, stating that the human condition is a curse and that he does not want to shut himself off from experience. The repetition of the word “maybe” introduces doubt regarding the exact terms of the curse.

“When she reached 44 Greenwich Avenue she went inside alone, and only the crow knew that it was possible for a woman to claim to have no heart at all and still cry as though her heart would break.”

While Frances has been in the process of self-denial, calling herself the Maid of Thorns and attempting to protect herself from love, her familiar, the anthropomorphized crow Lewis, instinctively knows her better. The paradox of crying as though one’s heart will break when one is apparently heartless indicates the depth of Frances’s feelings for Haylin and sense of unease without him.

“She still wore the ring Levi had given her, even though the moment when he told her to close her eyes so he could give her this birthday gift felt so far away. They had likely been together twenty times, an entire world created in just days.”

Although Jet and Levi only met 20 times, her attachment to him resembles that of a mournful widow. The image of a world “created in just days” evokes God’s creation of the world and indicates the extent to which Levi changed Jet’s life. Her continuing to wear the ring he gave her, a symbol of eternity, indicates that she will never fully open herself up to love again, despite the increasing distance between the present and the time she last saw Levi. Jet’s lifelong devotion gives weight to the curse.

“He pushed the button for Lobby, but halfway down he stopped the elevator’s descent and drew Franny to him. In an unexpected show of intimacy he put his mouth against hers. It was so fast and intense nothing could stop what happened next. […] It was fate and they didn’t try to fight against it.”

Hoffman frames Frances and Haylin’s sexual encounter in the elevator as an illustration of the inexorableness of their feelings for one another. The lack of punctuation in the sentence describing the speed and the intensity of their falling on each other demonstrates the power of their desire. As they are moved by a force outside of their conscious selves, it feels like fate.

“She didn’t understand that when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse, it’s what life is, my girl. We all come to ruin, we turn to dust, but whom we love is the thing that lasts.”

Aunt Isabelle’s dying words to Frances are a plea for her to open herself up to love. She states that Maria Owens misunderstood that the destruction wrought by reciprocal love is less a curse than the trajectory of an ordinary life. On her deathbed, Isabelle is supremely conscious of the destructible matter of a human body and life and turns the curse on its head when she says that love is the only thing that lasts.

“On the first day of December 1969, the lottery was held. Men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six would be drafted in Vietnam according to their birth dates. Lives were interrupted and fortunes exchanged […] Those chosen were computerized, their fates picked at random.”

The birth-date lottery deciding which young men will fight in Vietnam has the quality of a curse. While the computerized element seems objective and the opposite of magic, it introduces the superstitious aspect of chance to a society that believes itself increasingly rational. The idea of fortunes being exchanged and the previously lucky becoming unlucky gives an impression of turmoil and sets the scene for the full-scale disruption of Vincent’s life, just as he has grown more comfortable with himself.

“Life is a mystery, and it should be so, for the sorrow that accompanies being human and the choices one will have to make are a burden, too heavy for most to know before their time comes.”

This epigrammatic statement follows the destructiveness of Vincent’s knowledge that his fate is to fight in Vietnam when, at 14, he looked into Aunt Isabelle’s divining mirror. The acts of looking in the mirror and trying to predict life based on the curse go against the edict that life should be mysterious. This is also a warning to be humble and not seek too much knowledge prematurely.

“We’ll trick the curse. We won’t marry and we won’t live together. We’ll never speak of love. […] We’ll just outwit the damned thing. We’ll never say the word love aloud. We’ll never think or breathe it. If we do that, nothing can get in the way.”

Haylin hatches a plan to outmaneuver the Owens family curse: They will still be together, while forgoing outward signs of being romantically involved. Haylin’s attitude speaks to his scientific, logical mindset; he is testing a formula to bargain with the terms of the curse. Since Franny and Haylin manage to be noncohabiting lovers for 20 years before his cancer diagnosis, Haylin’s precautions seem to work. However, as he elaborates on all the ways they cannot express their love, he indicates the sacrifices they will have to make to be together safely.

“So that he could live freely Madame Durant advised it would be best if he died. It must be public and final. He would no longer be a wanted man. His government would forget him, and so would everyone else. He could be himself, but with a new name and a new life, and what’s more, he could then avoid the Owens curse.”

Plagued by both a government who wants to incarcerate him for skipping military service and the Owens curse, Vincent has reached the end of the line. While death and rebirth into a new life offers escape from these limitations, he must make the significant sacrifice of being forgotten by everyone who knew him in his first life. Although Madame Durant advises that he will be himself, it will be an entirely different experience.

“Jet stood up, holding the rosemary. It was wilted brown, but as she watched, it became green in her hands. Her gray eyes rimmed with tears. What she had lost had returned. When two girls passed by the fence she knew what they were thinking, although she was too well mannered to ever tell. She had the sight once more.”

The sight that Jet has lost owing to the trauma of losing Levi and her parents returns to her many years later, a sign that she has finally let go of the past and has fully resumed ownership of her life. This is conveyed through the miracle of wilted rosemary becoming fresh and green in her hands, another symbol of regeneration.

“For seven days Frances Owens did not brush her hair or wash her face or have a meal. The birds in the thickets came to nest in the vines, but she couldn’t even hear them sing and they wouldn’t come to her when she held out her hands. She had lost some of who she was when she lost her beloved.”

The removal of Frances’s affinity with birds following her loss indicates the depth of her grief. Hoffman shows how these witches become more mortal and somehow vulnerable during their sadness. The lack of care over her person indicates another means of detaching from who she is, as well as from the world and its values.

“This was the moment Sally had been dreading, when the life they had enjoyed was turned upside down. Her grandmother had confided that it happened to everyone sooner or later. Sally had always thought it would be later, but as it turned out it was now.”

Although she is very young, Sally has some awareness of the Owens curse, which dictates that the family will lose those they love. Sally’s thought that her parents’ death would be later rather than sooner indicates a naive hope to put off the inevitable. The emphasis on this moment and “now” suggests the cruelty of fate and the urgency of Sally’s predicament.