Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics

Western Folklore, Spring 2002 by Fine, Gary Alan

Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. By Alan Bundes. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Pp. xx 141, preface, acknowledgments, index. $40.00 cloth); The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Essay on Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character. By Alan Dundes. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Pp. xiii 201, acknowledgments, preface, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth, $21.95 paper)

Psychoanalytic folkloristics has (one might suggest charitably) an uncertain history and a dubious future. More closely linked to psychoanalysis than to academic folklore, the approach demands training in two distinct intellectual arenas-both, sadly, in distress at the turn of the Millennium. Its leading proponent is Alan Dundes, who quotes a colleague as describing his position as that of "a leader in the field without any followers!" (Mirror, p. xi); asserting that his colleagues feel "extreme prejudice" towards his approach.

For years, Alan Dundes appeared to enjoy his role as Grand Contrarian. His zest in attacking orthodoxy was palpable, even as he felt wronged by the scorn of his audiences. As he nears the end of a long and distinguished career, his intellectual isolation-an absence of scholarly offspring-has begun to grate, and his two latest works are filled with plaints against folklorists and psychoanalysts, including a claim that "my family members have wondered about my longstanding devotion" to psychoanalysis. Was Freud the best life-partner? Perhaps it is comforting that fellow folklorists have so little interest in psychodynamics that Dundes' concern with his own seminal barrenness will pass unnoticed.

Both Bloody Mary in the Mirror and The Shabbat Elevator are characteristic of Dundes' writings over the decades. The former is a collection of seven essays on different topics and of varying depth and persuasiveness, the latter an extended essay dealing with Jewish ethnic character through the lens of Sabbath observations. Each essay in Mirror is self-contained. Missing is an overall statement of psychoanalytic folklore theory, an extended argument constructed for folklorists in general rather than for specialists on any of several narrow topics. The opening chapter of Mirror, "The Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Custom and Belief," comes closest-it is a brief essay, but one in which Dundes begins to lay out a theory of religion as a transformative mirror of family dynamics. Clues of this theoretical approach are evident elsewhere, as in his analysis of projective inversion in the Egyptian "Two Brothers" folktale (Chapter 3). (Projection theory seems to serve folklore theory well, for unlike purely textual interpretations, it potentially connects to the performance and to audience response.)

Dundes' greatest strength as a scholar is his vast erudition. The number of different references in his corpus is awe-inspiring. Unlike many scholars whose bibliographies largely overlap, Dundes provides us with a new literature in support of each analysis. In Mirror (p. xi), he reveals that when he was a child, his father offered him a dollar for every hundred books he read-a not-unacceptably stingy reward for so voracious a reader. Whether his compulsive consumption of volumes should be treated as phallo-genital conquest, anal compulsion, or neo-classical economic rational choice I leave to others to decide, but we readers are the better for it. Dundes has, moreover, a powerfully rich and organized imagination, which gives him the rare ability to create a consistent and, in its detail, plausible psychoanalytic theory for each case he discusses: anal compulsion (Jewish religious custom), infantilization (fraternity initiation), menstrual anxiety (preadolescent girls' ritual), male Electra imagery (Disney's The Little Mermaid), breast-feeding fantasies (vampire beliefs). The interpretive punchline for each analysis, considered by itself, may occasion scoffing, but the mass of data within, usually consistent, can be persuasive. The arguments are often so well supported that those who choose to reject them for reasons of ideology must reject them ex cathedra without actually demonstrating the supposed inadequacies of psychoanalysis.

Even if some psychoanalytic interpretations are correct, not all are. Nearly twenty years ago, in addressing the question of the adequacy of psychoanalytic folklore (the original question of the essay was whether Alan Bundes was ever right!), I proposed two criteria by which to judge psychodynamic explanations: internal consistency and external validity (Fine 1984). The former suggests that all of the most important details in a text have been explained, the latter that the social context or performance of the text is consistent with the textual argument. By these measures the seven essays in Mirror vary. Most powerful is Bundes' assessment of the ritual known as "Bloody Mary in the Mirror." The details (blood, toilet, magical incantations) and related texts are consistent with an interpretation suggesting that prepubescent girls fear menarche and use the ritual to address their fears. (However, his claim that the ritual labels "Mary Worth" and "Mary Whales" refer, alternatively, to the "worth" of women and their "wails" in menstruation [p. 86] is risible.) The ritual occurs at precisely the life-cycle moment that one would expect it. The explanation fits the social structure in which the ritual routinely emerges. And we are faced with Bundes' pointed challenge: what alternative explanation works better?