The Rules of Magic

As the Owenses navigate their magical selves in the ordinary world, they confront the challenge of wanting to fully actualize their powers while desiring to fit in and have aspects of everyday human experience. The Owens children are raised in denial of their heritage, at a physical remove from the ancestral seat in Massachusetts and forbidden from exploring their magical identity. Indeed, the children’s unusual tendencies are rationalized by their psychiatrist father, Dr. Burke Owens, who thinks that while they refrain from being in contact with the wider Owens family, their unusual “characteristics” will remain “dormant” (17). To this, their mother adds a frantic catalog of prohibitions—“no walking in the moonlight, no Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black” (3)—a compilation of things with a magical aura from numerous folklore and fairytale references that illustrates her desperate wish to protect her children from the paranormal. However, Hoffman shows that Susanna’s quest is futile from the outset, as the children do not need such paraphernalia to exercise magical gifts such as communing with birds or reading minds. Indeed, Susanna’s inability to deny that she is an Owens extends to herself, as she is unable to refrain from certain superstitions, such as wearing blue for protection or attributing melting butter to the presence of love. The red shoes that Frances finds in Susanna’s closet are the ultimate symbol of keeping her true identity private.

Whereas the house in Manhattan is a place of self-denial, Aunt Isabelle’s homestead in Massachusetts, with its garden of plant cures and lack of bedtimes, is a place of ultimate self-acceptance and exploration. The house continues to function this way when Frances and Jet take it over as custodians of the new generation. The Owens children overturn their parents’ rules, flaunting how they can float witch-style on Leech Lake, exploring their family history in the library, and learning spells that can make them levitate. Still, they must also learn painful, often frightening lessons about their limitations, such as when the curse engenders death by lightning or when Vincent sees his future in Aunt Isabelle’s mirror. Instead of imposing boundaries, the stay at Aunt Isabelle’s forces the children to reckon with the reality of being Owenses and come up with their own rules. In fact, the rules of magic referred to in the novel’s title are not fixed but instead written through life experience.

The children learn the dangers of self-denial through the example of cousin Maggie, who went against her family and as a result lost her magic and became a powerless rabbit. Hoffman explains how, as Maggie “denied who she was,” it was “easy enough to become something else entirely, most likely the first creature you see, which in her case was a rabbit darting through the garden” (30). The smallness and timidity of the darting rabbit symbolizes how Maggie’s self-denial caused her to become a much lower, powerless form of life. While other characters in the novel do not undergo such extreme transformations, when they deny the fullness of themselves, either regarding magic or love, they also become depleted. For example, Jet’s guilt after the accident that dispenses with Levi and her parents causes her to mistake herself for a loathsome person, a quality that leads to her losing the gift of her magical insight. Then Vincent’s wish to deny that he can see the future makes him seek refuge in practicing dark magic and in drink, which greatly minimizes his potential.

The stay in Massachusetts, where the Owens identity is in its most open form, is also useful in illustrating public opposition to the family. The small town is a microcosm where the Owenses’ history is known and Aunt Isabelle’s eccentric ways can be observed at close range. Arguably, the Owens family is feared because it is a threat to the patriarchy that has held institutional power for centuries. This is evidenced in the family’s origin, when Maria Owens raises an illegitimate child of uncertain paternity and then manages to build a fine house for herself without a man. Then, in her descendants, “husbands disappeared without a trace” and “daughters begat daughters” (3) in a manner suggesting that men, who traditionally hold the institutional power, are dispensable and especially vulnerable, while the Owens women seem capable of thriving and reproducing on their own. Such feats of independence, in addition to sightings of their magical activities, ensure that new generations of witches are treated with the same loathing and suspicion that afflicted women who were tried for witchcraft in Salem. This is heightened when Hoffman alludes to the original opposition of female witch and male witch-hunter. While they are despised in many quarters, especially by the most male institutions, such as the Church, the Owenses’ position in town is not fixed. This is shown in the townswomen’s reliance on the family’s midnight porch cures, which sets up a relationship of respect and dependency, even as they continue to fear the Owenses by daylight. Indeed, by the end of the novel, there seems to be a hint of reparation between the Owenses and the town’s men, as the formerly hostile Reverend Willard befriends the family and another man vouches for their goodness after Aunt Isabelle heals his sons from heroin addiction.

Still, as Frances and Jet take over the homestead, Hoffman needs to maintain a level of tension between the Owenses and the townsfolk to fully demonstrate the risks of being an Owens to the new generation who will take up residence in the house. It is therefore important that Gillian and Sally find Frances especially to be stern and eccentric, so that enough opposition with the outside world is maintained.