Felicia was the real Witch of Eastwick. The film just didn’t know what to do with her.
If you’re like me, you didn’t remember The Witches of Eastwick (1987) accurately. Back then, it seemed like a feminist movie: Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer reclaiming their power against the literal devil. But it’s not that film – not really. It’s a strange, coked-up mess that can’t decide what it’s trying to say about female empowerment, desire, or even the nature of evil. It just hurtles from scene to scene, escalating wildly without ever stopping to connect the dots.
But, almost certainly, everyone remembers Veronica Cartwright’s Felicia: screeching in church, writhing in bed and vomiting cherry pits until her husband silences her with a poker.
So here’s the thing: I’d argue Felicia is the most interesting character in the film, and maybe the only one who ever actually understood what was going on.
She’s clearly a witch. Not the type who floats or conjures storms, but one that sees too much and won’t play along. The type that got burnt at the stake for telling the truth. Felicia doesn’t fall under Darryl Van Horne’s spell. And it drives her mad, not because she’s weak, but because no one else will listen.
And the film punishes her for it in a way that’s quietly brutal.
Before Darryl even shows up, Felicia is just a woman singing patriotic songs at the school and worrying about the snowy egrets losing their nesting grounds. She’s marked as “difficult” for caring too much in a town built on denial.
Then Darryl arrives. And his first act isn’t seducing the witches – it’s engineering Felicia’s fall. Literally. She slips on scattered pearls, breaks her leg, and spirals into what the film calls madness. But it’s more like a psychic overload. Her mind starts receiving the static of his presence: too much truth with no filter or buffer. Her moral compass is so finely tuned that his arrival hits her like a migraine to the soul.
The doctor tells her husband, Clyde, that her paranoia and erratic speech are symptoms of the injury. She’s not well and she’s not responsible for what she says.
And yes – in that state, she does terrible things: she lashes out, gets Suki fired, says vicious, hurtful things. But that pain isn’t coming from nowhere – it’s a direct result of Darryl’s arrival and the unchecked forces swirling around him. The story tells us this, even as it lets the town – and the audience – ignore it. Instead, her illness becomes a kind of moral justification. “See?” the film says. “She brought this on herself. She was impossible. She had to go.
But that isn’t justice – it’s scapegoating.
Felicia isn’t just paranoid, she’s perceptive. In a moment of clarity, she says “those poor women” about the Witches. Later, after being dragged from the church while a mix of onlookers gasp and snicker, she tells her husband, “I have nothing against a good f**k, but there is danger here, and somebody has to do something about it.” It’s not repression or prudery – it’s insight.
Felicia doesn’t get seduced or corrupted. She gets destroyed because she’s the only one who sees clearly and the film never lets us make peace with that.
Darryl’s presence causes her pain and she’s physically tormented by the awakening of the witches’ power, but nobody helps her. When her husband finally murders her with a poker, the film knows it’s a monstrous act but it doesn’t treat it like a crime. He just looks dazed and wanders around while the ambulance picks up her body. No cuffs. No police asking questions.
We understand how much he suffered and how he had no choice: after all, she was really annoying.
Felicia’s tragedy is that the story doesn’t know what to do with a woman who doesn’t act the way we expect. She’s not the beautiful, free-spirited lead who gets the adventure, she’s the uptight shrew who deserves death. And she could have been the film’s emotional compass but instead, she’s a cautionary tale of why women should stay in their lane. She deserved more than that.
Bye, Felicia. You should’ve been the main character.