Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics (review)

Alan Dundes has been a leading scholar in the fields of anthropology and folklore for nearly forty years, during which he has untiringly made a case for interpretation. His professed academic credo, "To make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational, and seek to make the unconscious conscious" (p. 137), places Dundes on a path also trod by Freud and Lévi-Strauss (see Tristes Tropiques [Plon, 1955], pp. 61-63); however, Dundes's constant effort to interweave structural description and Freudian interpretation has set him against the grain of mainstream folkloristics. He reckons "folklorists are too often regarded (rightly, I think) by their fellow academics as mere collectors and classifiers, but rarely if ever as bona fide scholars seeking to analyze their data meaningfully" (p. ix). Alternatively, Dundes hopes to pave the way for "psychoanalytic folkloristics" (p. x) in showing that psychoanalysis provides the necessary tools—namely, a "range of concepts such as 'projection' and 'family romance' (the Oedipus and Electra complexes)" (p. xvi)—to understand folklore.

Bloody Mary in the Mirror comprises a preface, in which the author defines his subject matter and sketches the formation of his life interest in folklore and in psychoanalytic theory, seven recently published essays (including two coauthored by Lauren Dundes) that illustrate the application of Freudian tenets to folklore, and a short epilogue that sets the whole book in the light of the author's lifelong objective of making sense of nonsense while seeking to make the unconscious conscious. Various subjects—religious behavior, vampire beliefs, wondertales ancient and modern, contemporary American rituals, and Mediterranean mores—come under examination to tackle the big question: can psychoanalytic theory materially help us understand folkloristic data? Overall, Dundes challenges readers to judge "whether or not one or more of these essays succeeds in yielding genuine insight into the folklore data in question" (pp. xvi-xvii).

Even though few readers are likely to agree with all the interpretations presented, and critics may feel that some readings oversimplify matters, the overall answer must be "yes." Take for example the book's core chapter, "Bloody Mary in the Mirror." This piece seeks to explain the American contemporary teenage practice of summoning Bloody Mary to appear in a bathroom mirror. Dundes interprets this "rite" as an adolescent celebration of the onset of the first menses, the mirror bleeding image being hypothetically a self-image of sorts. In this strain, Dundes explains an oozing cut in the mirror woman's forehead as an upward displacement of the bleeding vagina, taking account of a demonstrable equivalence of the head and genital area on one hand, and of evidence that "Bloody Mary" connotes menstruation on the other. Independent confirmation for this interpretation comes from Iberia, where the bloody woman in the mirror is called Veronica. For centuries in Western Christendom this name has unified under the heading of a "true image," vera icon, the hemorrhagic woman healed by Jesus (Matt. 9.20-22) and the woman who collects the bloody sweat of Christ on a cloth (Gervase Otia imperialia 3.25, cf. Evangelium Nichodemi chap. 7, Vindicta Salvatoris chap. 18). Note the mirror imagery: Jesus quenches the woman's genital flux; Veronica dries up Christ's facial blood and so becomes his simile (for "veronica" designates both the woman and the bloody imprint on her cloth). Thus, the modern equivalence of Bloody Mary and Veronica—the namesake crystallizing the ancient mirroring of hemorrhagic genitals and a bleeding face—confirms that, in the American ritual, a bleeding face is the mirror image of a menstruating girl. Dundes, working on contemporary American data, reveals equivalencies enduring throughout centuries and across continents. By any standard, such ability to grasp fundamental layers of symbolism must qualify as "genuine insight" into folklore data.

To what extent Dundes owes this interpretive capacity to psychoanalytic theory is...