53 pages • 1 hour read
Alice HoffmanThe Rules of Magic
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4 Summary: “Elemental”
Haylin comes to New York to confront Frances with an ultimatum: either she will be with him or he will marry Emily. Frances leaves him to Emily, still believing that it is for his own good. She attends his engagement party, and she and Haylin end up making love in the lift. She leaves Haylin frustrated that she cannot make a promise to him, assuming that he follows through with the wedding.
Vincent and William fly to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, where they are able to be more open as gay lovers, and Vincent acquires fame for his singing. There April tells Vincent that he fathered Regina the summer he stayed at Aunt Isabelle’s. April conjectures that as Regina has a double Owens bloodline, she will also live for a short time.
Back in New York, Vincent gets attacked during the Stonewall riots. William takes him to Sag Harbor to meet his father, Alan, a man who has been gay all his life but has had to hide the truth of himself.
Jet goes to visit the cemetery where Levi is buried and realizes that she is not far from the tree where the witches were hung at the bequest of Hathorne, the man who fathered Maria Owens’s child. She sees the reverend at the cemetery but flees before he can chastise her. However, she sees a turn in his attitude toward her when she notices that he does not toss away a bunch of daffodils she left on Levi’s grave. The next time she visits, he allows her inside the house, and subsequently the two form a friendship.
Frances receives a note from Aunt Isabelle to come to Massachusetts. Her aunt informs her that she is dying from pancreatic cancer. On her deathbed, Aunt Isabelle gives her Maria Owens’s sapphire and tells her not to be afraid of love, as it will be her salvation from death. She also predicts that Jet’s sight will come back to her and that they should share the grimoire.
Part 4 Analysis
The sense of the magical world of 1960s New York continues in Part 4; Hoffman sets the scene for an era of discovery concerning both natural and technological wonders. Hoffman describes it as a time when “miraculous things happened every day,” from Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, on a global level, to the sighting of an albino deer on a bench in New York’s Washington Square Park, which causes “even children who didn’t believe in fairy tales” to find “themselves believing” (248). This backdrop of constant wonder and change aligns with circumstances that will cause the characters’ lives to transform beyond recognition.
Prior to the turbulence that will see Vincent dying off in his current identity and being revived in a new one in Part 5, Part 4 shows him finally at ease with himself, especially when William tells him, “I love you because of who you are” (248) with regard to the marginalized identities of gay man and witch. This level of grounding and peace is transformative for restless Vincent, and all story elements in this part of the novel supports his moving toward the truth. The couple’s trip to California, a place where they can be more openly affectionate, coincides with April’s revelation that Vincent is Regina’s father and that the girl has inherited a doubly short lifeline from them. April’s tearful pronouncement that Regina will “grow up” and not live much longer creates a state of suspense and imminence (223), leading the reader to expect the swift unfolding of her lifeline to make way for Practical Magic heroines Gillian and Sally. Still, Regina’s fate creates pathos, especially as she seems to be a little vessel of Vincent, with her love of songs and affinity for music.
Part 4 also sees a sense of closure regarding the antipathy that cost Levi his life between Jet and the reverend. Jet gains further clearance of her guilt for the accident when the reverend mends his puritanical ways and seeks to befriend her. Still, Jet embodies the theme of romantic love as curse and idyll as she continues to revere Levi as the love of her life, in the manner of an old widow rather than a young woman. She does, however, find peace and acceptance in this identity.
Although Frances is the only one of the Owens children who has stopped herself from fully surrendering to romantic love, continually putting Haylin off every time she comes close to him, Aunt Isabelle, on her deathbed, informs Frances that she will be “dying” as much as her aunt unless she allows herself to love someone (254). Whether she means a literal or figurative death is left ambiguous. The question of how, and how much, to love is one important to the Practical Magic series as a whole, and each individual must find their own answers.
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By Alice Hoffman
