27- Frances and Bridget (Jet) Owens (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest) The Aunts. Practical Magic (1998).
“My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage.”
I freaking love these two women. Frances and Jet Owens are the lovable and eccentric aunts to Sally and Gillian Owens (#53) from the 1998 movie Practical Magic. Their characters originate in the book by the same name from Alice Hoffman, and are featured in her recently released prequel The Rules of Magic (2017) which sheds light onto their lives before we meet them in Practical Magic. They remain two of my all time favorite witch-aunts, even giving Hilda and Zelda Spellman (#36) a serious run for their money. I’m not hear to pin sets of aunts against each other; they are vastly different, with each set being truly unrivaled.
As sisters, Frances and Jet build off of each other’s character. They function as two halves of a whole parental unit, balancing out the strengths and weaknesses of the other. They are guided by an unyielding faith in their craft, embodying the tradition in a total and holistic manner. To them, witchcraft is not merely a practice, religion, or tradition— its their intrinsic essence, being, and way of life. As Frances puts it to Sally admonishingly “…this is what comes from dabbling; I mean you can’t practice witchcraft while you look down your nose at it.” For Frances and Jet it’s all or nothing, as it should be for a practice that has potentially dire consequences with misuse.
Frances and Bridget truly embody the place all witches reside. They simultaneously exist in the outskirts and margins, while nevertheless occupying the center. On the one hand, they are cast out from the town, vilified, and feared. On the other, they are sought after for guidance, beseeched for help, and petitioned for favors. They exist in the front of the minds of the people who hate them, but also in the liminal place between reason and rationality. In the day time they are scoffed at, but at night they are awoken by the sounds of those who desperately need them.
The Aunts have embraced their destiny, unlike Sally who continually fights it and Gillian who consistently runs away from it. They play the part, and do it with perfect parasols and patient power. While they can be carefree, eating chocolate cake for breakfast, they can turn on a dime and become as serious and cautious as the situation requires. Their knowledge and wisdom comes through experience and age, and in this way, illustrate a double-faceted version of the beloved Crone, (to the dual Mother of Sally/Gillian and the dual Maidens of Kylie/Antonia, Sally’s daughters). In this way, Frances and Jet fully and completely depict the all encompassing matriarchal lineage and tradition of witchcraft, seen through the entire Owen’s ancestry.
In a brilliant depiction of allegorical witchcraft, and perhaps the best scene in the entire movie, Frances and Jet are seen mimicking the classic witch-trope of “bubble bubble toil and trouble” (to be featured later in my series) during the now famous Midnight Margaritas scene. The sisters are concocting a secret brew, but with 20th century finesse, spin the whole thing up in a blender. The sound of ice crunching and witches howling echos throughout the house, awakening Sally and Gillian, who come down to imbibe the midnight madness. Never have I seen such a scene that as perfectly illustrates the clandestine rituals of witchcraft, complete with the hysterical and maenadic cackling of the four women. Dancing around their kitchen and getting further and further inebriated, the women regress into primordial witches. Channeling their subconscious minds they begin to lash out, with harsh realities and painful truths bubbling up to the surface. The spell (see: tequila) works, and the midnight margaritas have opened the door to another plane of existence. While I’m sure the director did all of this unknowingly, Frances, Jet, Sally, and Gillian in this moment become the quintessential coven.
Frances and Bridget illustrate dozens of principles of witchcraft, with probably exponential growth in this regard with the release of their own book. From their side plot of serving on the Solstice gathering committee (witches love committees—this pops up time and time again in television and film, and certainly in actual neopagan and witchcraft organizations), to their passive gardening and natural green thumbs, they truly are two witches of the ages. They are reminiscent of witches from the likes of Minerva McGonagall (#60) to Mother Goose (#53) in both their firm hands and love of children respectively. As the kids are saying these days, Frances and Jet are #squadgoals, and for me, two witch-icons whose lives I will forever be trying to replicate.
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