Bloody Mary in the mirror: A rutual reflection of pre-pubescent anxiety

Western Folklore, Spring 1998 by Dundes, Alan

One of the most disheartening aspects of folkloristics, the scientific study of folklore, is the persistent lack of analysis or interpretation. It is not just popularizers who churn out anthology after anthology of "texts only" without attention to context or possible meaning(s) of such texts, but the academic folklorists themselves, who despite pretentious definitional debates about the wisdom of continuing to use the term "folklore" or exaggerated claims of the importance of reporting folklore as "performed"even to the point of calling this approach "performance theory ---what exactly is the "theory" supposedly underlying "performance theory"???do little more than report folkloristic texts totally devoid of the slightest hint of thoughtful commentary. Yes, certainly the legitimate concern for performance has resulted in more accurate reporting of texts, but it is nonetheless hard to find instances where such increased accuracy has yielded actual insights with respect to the meaning or significance of a folkloristic event.

I would like to illustrate this disappointing facet of folkloristics by examining one single traditional ritual found in American folklore. (It has also been reported in Newfoundland [Hiscock 1996].) After surveying what little is known about the ritual, I will propose an interpretation of it which I believe will make perfectly clear what the ritual is all about.

In 1976, Mary and Herbert Knapp, in their anthology of American children's folklore, devote a whole paragraph in a general discussion of what they term "Scaries" to the following item:

"One child told us she was always too chicken to summon Mary Worth. She said, 'I knew I'd really be scared.' And really being scared is no fun.

A child summons Mary Worth, alias Bloody Mary, alias Mary Jane, by going into the bathroom alone at night, turning out the lights, staring into the mirror, and repeating "Mary Worth," softly but distinctly, forty-seven times. She comes at you out of the mirror, with a knife in her hand and a wart on her nose. Never when we read Mary Worth comic strips did we dream that the respectable busybody was moonlighting as a mirror witch!" (1976:242).

Here we have most of the primary elements of this ritual: a child, almost always a girl, goes into a bathroom at night (or at school in the dark) and repeats the name Mary in some form which supposedly results in a frightening creature named Mary emerging from out of the bathroom mirror.

Folklorist Simon J. Bronner in his 1988 American Children's Folklore included an entire page of discussion of what he called "Mary Worth Rituals. " He describes the ritual as "a girls' tradition common in elementary school" which invokes "atmosphere of the seance" (1988:168). Whoever the "Mary" figure is, Bronner indicates that the participants are "Huddled typically in a bathroom with the lights turned off" and that they "have to really 'believe' in her, or else she won't appear" (1988:168). In his notes to his texts, Bronner remarks that "Bloody Mary" is yet another name for variations of 'Mary Worth' rituals" (1988:266, n.24). One of the five texts Bronner reports-collected from a male informant from Middletown, Pennsylvania, in 1984-is as follows:

Bloody Mary was a character who was murdered in the woods behind Pine Road Elementary School. To call her ghost, girls go in the bathroom and prick their fingers with a pin to draw a drop of blood. Then they press the two droplets of blood together and say "We believe in Bloody Mary" ten times with their eyes shut. Then upon opening their eyes they look into the bathroom mirror. The image of Bloody Mary's face would appear in the mirror. She was said to have been a young girl with long hair, very pale skin, and blood running down her face from a large cut in her forehead (1988:168169).

Bronner offers no more in the way of interpretation than did the Knapps, but his text includes an element not found in the Knapps' brief report, namely, the presence of blood. It is precisely this element which turns out to be critical with respect to interpreting the ritual. Though Bronner provides little insight into the Bloody Mary custom he does at least refer in his notes to the only in-depth study of it, an essay by folklorist Janet Langlois entitled "'Mary Whales, I Believe in You': Myth and Ritual Subdued" which had appeared in Indiana Folklore in 1978. Folklorist Linda Degh evidently thought enough of Langlois's essay to reprint it in her edited anthology Indiana Folklore. A Reader in 1980.

Langlois bases her discussion of "Bloody Mary" upon some seventeen excellent texts, twelve of which were collected in Indianapolis in 1973. (The other texts came from the Indiana University folklore archives.) For some reason, she insisted upon calling the custom a "game" although she was well aware of the fact that the ritual was often connected with a "legend." Indeed, Langlois's principal concern in her essay was to seek to illuminate the long-standing and vexing question of the relationship between "myth" and "ritual". (For references to myth-ritual theory, see Segal, 1980, Grimes 1985, and Ackerman 1991.)