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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5 Summary: “Gravity”
Vincent finds himself drafted into the birth-date lottery to fight in the Vietnam War. Frances, who has been protective of Vincent since his birth, when a nurse tried to kidnap him, enlists Haylin, a practicing doctor, to pull some strings to deem Vincent medically unfit.
When Frances visits Haylin, it turns out that he did not marry Emily after all and that he plans to become a Marine doctor in the war. She tells Haylin the truth about her family and the curse. They plan to outmaneuver it by meeting as lovers but not living together, marrying, or articulating their love.
Vincent tells Frances and Jet the truth of Regina’s paternity and says that if anything happens to him or April, he wants them to adopt her. Frances hands him a note from Haylin explaining that Vincent has asthma as a means of escaping Vietnam. However, when the MD examines Vincent, he pronounces his lungs “clear as a bell” (277). Vincent then tries to get out of it by saying he is gay and that he has psychiatric issues. As a result, he is interned at Pilgrim State Hospital. When Frances learns that Vincent will be there at least a month, she enlists the help of Haylin to get him out. Haylin enters the hospital ward in his naval uniform, gives Vincent the keys to a Ford, and makes him escape to Germany. To make it look like a mugging, Vincent has to tie Haylin up and beat him.
One night soon after, Haylin and Frances meet at Central Park and go for a swim in the lake, completing the swim they had intended to take the night of their high-school graduation, when Haylin nearly drowned. They are more in love than ever. Meanwhile, Vincent has escaped from Germany to Paris. He misses his old life and William especially. He meets an older woman, Agnes Durant, who knew his mother, Susanna, when she was in Paris. Agnes advises that the best course of action would be for Vincent to have a death that seems final and then be reborn into a new name that would strip him of the Owens curse. He writes to his sisters and April and ingests wolfbane to bring on the semblance of his death. After, Agnes Durant arranges Vincent’s funeral at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, and his sisters and William arrive. At the funeral, Frances realizes that William is not with them—he too has disappeared. Frances is indignant because she believes that William knows Vincent is not dead. Jet reminds her that they must act as though this is the case for their own safety as well as Vincent’s.
When they return home to New York, Frances and Jet realize that where they truly belong is Aunt Isabelle’s on Magnolia Street. The Greenwich Village house becomes a literary agency. Despite the move, Jet continues to see Rafael once a year, and though he is in love with her, she is still afraid of the curse. Frances becomes a fixture at the library and a source of local curiosity for her hardy, eccentric ways. Jet becomes an expert gardener and one day sets Maggie, the witch who could not accept herself and so turned into a rabbit, free. The women begin to turn the porch light on after midnight, allowing people to come in for cures.
Meanwhile, Haylin is wounded while in service as a doctor with the Marines. When Frances learns the news, she immediately goes to visit him at the American Hospital of Paris. There she discovers that he has lost a leg. Still, he is happy to see Frances and return her affections in bed. While Haylin recovers and inquires after the hospital’s other patients, Frances remains in Paris. She meets Agnes, who testifies that Susanna’s lover died in a sailboat accident, devastating her, and that she truly loved Frances, who always felt like the black sheep of the children. Agnes also reassures her that Vincent is better off with his new name and life; now love will be possible for him. William still appears to be with him, and they have set up a base in the South of France. When Haylin gets out of the hospital, he tells Frances that after everything that has happened, he is coming to live close to her and that he does not care about being safe.
Haylin rents a small place near the Magnolia Street house and visits Frances every day. At first, he commutes to Boston, where he works in the General Hospital, but eventually he decides to become a local doctor. He is popular in town, especially with the children. Twenty happy years pass; Frances and Haylin think they have avoided the curse by not living together. Then Haylin diagnoses himself with terminal cancer. He and Frances decide to get married. Reverend Willard officiates the service, and it becomes a celebration of their love. They spend the rest of Haylin’s days together in the Magnolia Street house, feeling that they have lived their lives in love. Haylin is buried in Massachusetts with the Owenses. Frances is in deep mourning and wondering how she will love anyone again when the telephone rings.
Part 5 Analysis
Part 5’s title, “Gravity,” symbolizes the expectation of confronting reality as each of the Owens children face up to their destiny and become even more grounded in themselves. This aligns with Aunt Isabelle’s warning that they should know themselves. Part 5 also spans over two decades and sees the Owens children graduate from their experimental youths into a less turbulent middle age.
The threat of the halo of death that has surrounded Vincent since his birth becomes manifest when he is conscripted into military service in Vietnam by virtue of the birth-date lottery. While the announcement of Vincent’s birthday was the chance of computerized selection, the focus on the day of his birth amplifies the sense of doom that his magical relatives have always felt about his life span. Frances, who takes it for granted that Vincent will die in Vietnam, enlists Haylin’s help several times to prevent this, thrusting Vincent into exile from his old identity. However, although he has ostensibly escaped to safety in Paris, he is lonely without William and still threatened with being found out by the US authorities. His mother’s Parisian friend, Agnes, makes him see that he has no chance for happiness other than to shorten his already brief life span through a faked death. While he gives up being an Owens and his former identity only manifests later, in his gifts of macarons to his daughter, Regina, he continues to be William’s lover, albeit in a new identity. His faithfulness to love until the end evokes the theme of romantic love as curse and idyll, as he forgoes everything to be with his intended.
Meanwhile, Haylin, having finally learned about the Owens curse, decides that in the face of so much loss—both of his leg and of vital years with Frances—death does not seem as perilous as a half-life without his love. Frances and Haylin’s arrangement of being non-cohabiting lovers works successfully for over two decades, as they manage to be together while putting the curse off. Ironically, it takes the threat of Haylin’s imminent death via his cancer diagnosis to make them fully devote themselves to each other and get married. Although on the eve of a death, their marriage is also in defiance of it, as they testify to their love’s duration beyond the grave.
A further marker of Jet and Frances embracing the challenge of being an Owens is symbolized in their move from New York and the closure of their Greenwich Village store in favor of setting up at the ancestral seat in Massachusetts. Hoffman writes herself into the story here: Their 44 Greenwich Avenue address becomes the address of the real-life literary agency where she is represented, making herself a tenant of their magical locale. While the Owenses have left the ever-transforming city of New York behind, they look toward a future of becoming the custodians of the family magic and a refuge for orphaned Owenses like Gillian and Sally, who manifest at the end of Part 5 in a telephone call.
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By Alice Hoffman
