Bloody Mary in the Mirror: a Comparative Examination of a Living Tradition
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Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Comparative Examination of a Living Tradition By Laura Winter A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Folklore Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador November 2014 Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………….……………………....……………………………….3 Abstract……………………….…………………………………………………………...5 Chapter One Introduction…………………………………….…………………………………….........6 Explanation of Informant Grouping……………………………………………………...13 My Own Experiences With Bloody Mary…………………….……………………........21 Chapter Two Literature Review……………….…..…….…………………………………..................28 Chapter Three Complex Generic Forms……………………………………………………………...….46 Chapter Four Rhetorics of Play in Bloody Mary…...………………………………………..…………95 Belief and Cultural Catholicism………………………………………………………...101 Chapter Five Informants and the Function of Bloody Mary Among the Different Groups………….114 Table of Structural Elements………………………………………………...................124 Chapter Six Contemporary School Children and Bloody Mary…………………………..……........127 Chapter Seven Conclusions……………………………………………..………………………………149 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………157 2 Acknowledgements First and foremost I offer my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Philip Hiscock, who has supported me throughout my thesis with his infinite patience and vast knowledge. Thank you for guiding me along with gentle critique and great conversation. I would also like to thank Professor Shane O’Dea, whose unfailing belief in my academic abilities since I first walked into his English 1103 class many years ago, is undoubtedly responsible for any and all of my academic achievements. Special thanks as well to Dr. Martin Lovelace for his keen eye and suggestions about the motif index. I am fortunate to have extremely understanding and generous parents, who have (seldom) questioned my long and winding journey, all in the name of curiosity. They have happily supported my whims and, without that support, I never would have devoted several years of my life to researching a childhood fear and turning it into a Master’s thesis. The mere words “thank you” will never be enough. Of course, a debt of gratitude is owed to all of my informants: my former schoolmates, who dug deeply into their memories to talk about Brownies and Catholic iconography; friends and friends of friends, who made the time to sit down and tell me about slumber parties, graveyard trips and scary basement bathrooms; and the students of various schools where I have taught during the writing of this thesis. I would particularly like to thank the children of Bishop Feild Elementary School, and all of the staff there, for their words of encouragement and interest in this project. 3 Special thanks to Melissa Long, who somehow found time during her teaching internship to tackle the arduous task of being my copy-editor. Thanks also to Anne Lafferty for her assistance with sources on handfasting rituals. As well, I would like to acknowledge Danny Whalen for the time he took with my thesis and his encouraging words. Lastly, I would like to express my thanks to Erin Power, Jenina MacGillivray and Kerrie Cochrane. Without our endless cups of tea, writing dates, sometimes titillating conversations and your friendship, I never would have made it through this process. You are brilliant people and inspire me in many ways. 4 Abstract This thesis is a cultural analysis of Bloody Mary, which exists simultaneously as legend, ostension, folk drama, maturation ritual, a demonstration of social hierarchy within a folk group, and various types of play. I investigate Bloody Mary through the lens of each of these genres, exploring retrospective narratives from adults and teenagers, in addition to narratives collected from contemporary school children. Included in these groups are women who attended Catholic school in the 1980s and consider themselves “cultural Catholics,” adults who grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland during the 1980s but did not attend Catholic school, high school students from a small community just outside of St. John’s, and contemporary school- aged children. Building upon the research of Langlois, Dundes, Tucker, Ellis, Armitage and with consideration given to Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics of play, the present investigation analyzes the function of Bloody Mary to each group of informants, extracting elements of similarities and variants that could be conceptualized through a table of structural elements in order to show mutations over time, geography and cultural groupings (such as religion and age). This comparative, cross-cultural examination of contemporary usages and functions of Bloody Mary frames it as living, dynamic folklore and an important aspect of children’s folklore/childlore. 5 Chapter 1 Bloody Mary is an adolescent ritual activity that has been commonly reported for nearly half a century from most parts of North America. This thesis is documentation, exploration and cultural analysis of that children's activity, along with its various uses and generic forms, as it has been known in and around St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, over the past twenty-five years. While Bloody Mary has long been considered merely a game played by young girls, in this thesis, I consider Bloody Mary as something that exists simultaneously as legend, ostension, folk drama, maturation ritual, a demonstration of social hierarchy within a folk group, as well as various types of play. In this thesis, I explore the various generic forms of Bloody Mary, as written about by other scholars since the late 1970s. I then consider Bloody Mary as it pertains to my informants. As such, I examine the functions of Bloody Mary over time (beginning with the early 1980s through to current school children), geography, and cultural sub-culture (Catholic children compared to non-Catholic children). In exploring the Catholic sub-culture, I encountered an aspect of Bloody Mary that was exclusive to this group, and will thus examine the concept of a “Catholic ecotype” as applied to Bloody Mary. I also discuss the changes in transmission of Bloody Mary and the dynamic nature of Bloody Mary as it relates to children’s folklore. Throughout this thesis, I reference four main groups of informants using a system of acronyms and within these groups, the informants are referred to using their 6 first name (in most cases) and the first initial of their surname. In cases where I use only initials, it is at the request of the informant. I will briefly outline the referencing system here, with more detailed explanations given later in this chapter. The first group of informants will be referred to as “Former Catholic School Attendees” (FCSA), and consists mainly of my peers, those who attended St. Pius X School at the same time I did (in the 1980s). There are several other women in this group who did not attend the same school but attended other Catholic schools in the St. John’s area in the same period, and these are noted as slight variations. Another group of informants are high school students from Crescent Collegiate School in Whitbourne/Dildo, NL, where I worked briefly as a substitute teacher in 2009. This group of informants are referred to as “Whitbourne/Dildo” (WD). The next group of informants are contemporary school children, who were attending elementary school when I interviewed them. They were in a variety of grades and attended several different schools, and will be referred to as “Contemporary Elementary Students” (CES). The final group of informants were not chosen as informants intentionally, but rather serendipitously, and are referred to as “Folklore Interviews” (FI) throughout this thesis. They were often friends, or even friends-of-friends who, through casual conversation, took an interest in my topic and volunteered to be part of my research. Methodology Much of my early research for this thesis began as a term paper (as described below), and as I spoke with the students who became the second group of informants 7 (WD students), the idea of a cross-generational comparison began to emerge. I was fortunate that my profession as a classroom teacher afforded me the opportunities to speak with children of various ages about their Bloody Mary experiences. After doing fieldwork with my peers and high school students, I found that I encountered other informants almost “accidentally” through conversations at parties or in other social settings, such as school staff rooms. When I returned to teaching in a lower grade level classroom at Bishop Feild Elementary, the Bloody Mary activity once again came up among my students without me seeking it out. And so, as I began to analyze the narratives and experiences of these four groups of informants (FCSA, WD, FI and CES), many similarities emerged, for example, in the invocation of Bloody Mary and the prescribed setting used by most informants, yet the differences in usage, or functionality lead me to consider the multi-generic nature of Bloody Mary. I then sought out previous scholarship on the topic, or on closely related topics and considered where my own fieldwork fit with the work of other folklorists. How I Came Into This Topic I stumbled upon the topic when researching a term paper for a graduate course, Language and Play (FL6250), in 2009. I had chosen to write my paper on slumber party games played by my group of friends when they were pre-adolescents and teenagers. I began to ask my friends – consisting of women born in the