It’s spooky season and I’m a white woman born in the 1990’s and that can mean only one thing:
MIDNIGHT MARGARITAS FOR EVERYBODY!!
I don’t drink though.
At any rate, this is the first in a two-part series about queer and feminist lineages, pasts, and futures with a little neo-paganism and Catholicism and a bunch of anti-colonialism thrown in. All of this was inspired by a line in the 1998 film adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel of the same name, Practical Magic. This post and it’s upcoming sequel sit at the perfect intersection of pretty much everything in the my bio, so buckle up. This will be a heck of a broomstick ride.
just two gals cooking up some soup.
Major spoilers ahead for this nearly thirty year old film.
For the uninitiated, Practical Magic tells the story of the Owens family, namely sisters, ever practical Sally and free spirit Gillian, and their aunts – acerbic Franny and sweet Jet. The Owens are a lineage of witches in a small New England town. Perennial outsiders, they struggle to find love and happiness against a curse cast on any who dares to love an Owens by their ancestor Maria in a moment of anguish over the man who betrayed her.
As a public adaptation scholar, I find Practical Magic beyond fascinating for a number of reasons. A big one is that the curse didn’t exist explicitly in Hoffman’s original novel. Lovers did tend to die, but there was no whisper of a curse, let alone it outright featuring in the narrative. But in 2018, Alice Hoffman released a prequel, Rules of Magic, following Franny and Jet – and their brother – through their own lovelorn youths. There, in plain print, is the curse. Another prequel, Magic Lessons, about progenitor Maria and the casting of the curse, was released in 2020, and the saga concluded with a 2021 sequel to 1995’s Practical Magic, The Book of Magic, about the adventure to break the Owens curse.
A sequel to the 1998 film, based on The Book of Magic is planned with Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, and Diane Weist all set to reprise their roles as Sally, Gillian, Franny, and Jet respectively. To say that the adaptational possibilities have me buzzing with excitement is an understatement, and I have some theories about the new cast members. But i digress.
There is a lot to be said about the four novels and the film, not the least of which are some necessary criticisms of the whiteness and oh Lord the colonialism of it all. Maria Owens was an early settler of colonized Turtle Island. The cast is exceedingly, painfully white (something that is trying to be remedied with the sequel though I remain suspicious of tokenization). The author is Jewish, and in Magic Lessons creates a familial connection to Sephardic Jewish pirates fleeing the Inquisition (some of the best parts of the saga for sure). I want to unpack the whole saga in more detail at some point, though for now I’ll focus in on the intriguing curse.
But first, feminism.
Practical Magic came about in what I’ll non-authoritatively call the whimsigoth boom of the late 90’s and early aughts. Charmed was just on the horizon, Willow was casting spells on Buffy, Sabrina the Teenage Witch was airing, and I had, like many young closeted lesbians, started to think of myself as a witch. Always, there was this thru line of some vague “woman power,” and stories about groups of womem. Sabrina lived with aunts, Charmed’s Halliwells were three sisters, Willow would eventually find Tara. The set of Practical Magic was a rarity in Hollywood – men were the minority on camera, and to an extent behind it.
The vulnerable looking out for each other is, to my mind, the only way in which we survive and thrive, and even with it’s limited scope we see this ethos come through in the narrative of Practical Magic. Throughout the film, we see women looking out for each other; it’s in Aunts Fran and Jet taking in Sally and Gillian after their parents’ tragic deaths, and then Sally and her own daughters when she loses her husband. Gillian stays up all night driving across the country to be with Sally during her grief. This fierce connection is present when Sally answers the phone knowing it is her sister in crisis, and immediately goes to her rescue. It’s there when Sally and Gillian not-quite-accidentally kill Gilly’s abusive boyfriend. Twice. And then bury him in the garden, being sure to stomp the ground flat after. This is no way instructive of course.
It’s not all sunshine and witchy rainbows though.
Maria Owens, in the film’s version of the story, was “quite the heartbreaker” and “most of her lovers had wives on the hanging committee.” It is women turned against her that led to her attempted hanging, then banishment to a place where her lover’s failure to come to her led her to curse against the concept of love itself. Their family has faced generations of being blamed for “everything that goes wrong” in their town.
I hear echoes – or shouts – of this everywhere, these days. To push back against the white supremacist patriarchal colonial ruling powers, those marginalized by them should be banded together. Yet constantly, we are taught to other, or that we are other. Black women, Indigenous women, immigrant women, transgender women are all made scapegoats. They (we) are the bad girls. The bad girls who sleep around, who get “uppity,” who change their bodies for themselves, who demand to be treated like human beings and give the rest of us the idea that we can too.
Again, intersectional feminism is far beyond either Alice Hoffman’s or the film’s scope. And yet we can – and do – find ourselves in the stories that we hold dear. I see my queer story in a group of women altogether in a house, in the way two of them swear to grow old together, “two old biddies and all of these cats,” and even to die on the same day. And so in spite of its failings, I keep loving Practical Magic. A couple of years ago, on a rare at the time, now annual, summer rewatch, I realized something about the way the narrative is laid out.
In the third act of the film, Gillian is possessed – haunted, really, – by the spirit of her dead abuser. Her family gathers around her, ready to literally fight tooth and nail, but it is not enough. To save her sister, Sally calls all the women in town, outting her family as the witches they have always been rumored to be. “Outting” is not my language by the way, it is the film’s. One of Sally’s two friends says it of Sally to the other. “Sally just came out.”
And this time, rather than being repulsed, rather than name-calling and throwing stones as their ancestors did and, even as they have since they were children, the women come. They gather in a circle, they chant as instructed. In the chill-inducing climax, Sally cuts her hand and Gillian’s. as her sister did when they were children, crying out “My blood, your blood, our blood.” The other women push her into the circle as Aunt Franny yells “Maria’s blood.”
The film cuts rapidly back and forth between flashbacks of Sally And Gillian’s moments of connection through the years and shots of the aunts and the other women clasping hands, finally landing on a shot of Maria smiling as the music swells and bright flash of light fills the room along with a gust of wind that knocks everyone off their feet.
Not only is Gillian’s abuser banished, but the curse is broken. Because this time, the real enemy has been identified; t is the man who has done harm who must be exiled, not the woman he hurt. This act of community care, this act of love and bravery by Sally, says that even if her sister is slutty and flighty and has “the worst taste in men,” she still is worthy of protection, of being fought for. And it lights me up inside, makes my soul sing. The film shows a revolutionary optimism in how women, how the marginalized, can learn to band together, and in this narrative it sets Maria and all the Owens women free.
What follows is laughter, and a determined sweeping away of ashes – all the women together – and a finale that parallels the film’s opening; the whole town out to watch the witch(es) jump, this time all in good fun as they float off the roof in pointed hats.
None of this would have been possible without the coming together of the women. Maria curses herself and her descendants over the pain of being abandoned by a man. Her curse is broken when her descendants, surrounded by a community of women, come together in love. It is not the love of any man that saves them, but their love for each other. Women defending each other with their lives from men who would kill them. Can this deep and profound love, as Sally asks, “stretch across time and heal a broken heart?” The answer is clear; a resounding yes. No curse is needed to protect women from men – only our love for each other.
I am certainly a believer. In magic. In the Divine. I believe that love is the most practical of all magics, that it strengthens and binds us and reveals the very presence of the Divine. I believe love is the very presence of the Divine. And I also believe that time is odd and misunderstood and magical itself. That we as descendants feel our ancestors, that our descendants are even now feeling us.
What does all of this have to do with Joan of Arc? Join me for part two, where I’ll do my best to connect those dots.
In the meanwhile I leave you with these lessons from Sally Owens (quoted from the book because the film cuts this kitchen witch’s favorite one, about potatoes):
“Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder.
Plant roses and lavender for luck
Always put pepper in your mashed potatoes
Keep rosemary by your garden gate
Fall in love whenever you can.”