
A cautionary tale or moral tale
is a tale told in
folklore
Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes oral traditions such as Narrative, tales, myths, legends, proverbs, Poetry, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. This also ...
to warn its listener of a
danger. There are three essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways. First, a
taboo
A taboo is a social group's ban, prohibition or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred or allowed only for certain people.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
or prohibition is stated: some act, location, or thing is said to be dangerous. Then, the narrative itself is told: someone disregarded the warning and performed the forbidden act. Finally, the violator comes to an unpleasant fate, which is frequently related in expansive and grisly detail.
Cautionary tales and conformity
Cautionary tales are
ubiquitous in
popular culture
Popular culture (also called pop culture or mass culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of cultural practice, practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as popular art f. pop art
F is the sixth letter of the Latin alphabet.
F may also refer to:
Science and technology Mathematics
* F or f, the number 15 (number), 15 in hexadecimal and higher positional systems
* ''p'F'q'', the hypergeometric function
* F-distributi ...
or mass art, sometimes contraste ...
; many
urban legend
Urban legend (sometimes modern legend, urban myth, or simply legend) is a genre of folklore concerning stories about an unusual (usually scary) or humorous event that many people believe to be true but largely are not.
These legends can be e ...
s are framed as cautionary tales: from the lover's lane haunted by a hook-handed
murder
Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification (jurisprudence), justification or valid excuse (legal), excuse committed with the necessary Intention (criminal law), intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisd ...
er to the tale of a man who shot a
cactus for fun only to die when the plant toppled onto him. Like
horror fiction
Horror is a genre of speculative fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten, or scare an audience. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defin ...
, generally the cautionary tale exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards social taboos. The narrator of a cautionary tale is momentarily excused from the ordinary demands of
etiquette
Etiquette ( /ˈɛtikɛt, -kɪt/) can be defined as a set of norms of personal behavior in polite society, usually occurring in the form of an ethical code of the expected and accepted social behaviors that accord with the conventions and ...
that discourages the use of gruesome or disgusting imagery because the tale serves to reinforce some other social taboo.
Cautionary tales are also frequently utilized to spread awareness of
moral
A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. ...
issues. For this reason, they are often told to children to make them conform to rules that either protect them or are for their own safety.
Those whose job it is to enforce
conformity
Conformity or conformism is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to social group, group norms, politics or being like-minded. Social norm, Norms are implicit, specific rules, guidance shared by a group of individuals, that guide t ...
therefore frequently resort to cautionary tales. The
German language
German (, ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western Europe, Western and Central Europe. It is the majority and Official language, official (or co-official) language in Germany, Austria, Switze ...
anthology, ''
Struwwelpeter'', contains tales such as "Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug" (The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches); it is fairly easy to deduce the ending from the title.
Social guidance film
Social guidance films constitute a genre of propaganda films attempting to influence children and adults to behave in certain ways. Social guidance films, particularly popular in the mid-20th century, were designed to address various social issues ...
s such as ''
Boys Beware'' or ''
Reefer Madness'' are deliberately patterned after traditional cautionary tales, as were the notorious
driver's education films (''
Red Asphalt'', ''
Signal 30'') of the 1960s, or military films about
syphilis
Syphilis () is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium ''Treponema pallidum'' subspecies ''pallidum''. The signs and symptoms depend on the stage it presents: primary, secondary, latent syphilis, latent or tertiary. The prim ...
and other
sexually transmitted diseases. The framework of the cautionary tale became a
cliché
A cliché ( or ; ) is a saying, idea, or element of an artistic work that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning, novelty, or literal and figurative language, figurative or artistic power, even to the point of now being b ...
in the
slasher film
A slasher film is a subgenre of horror films involving a killer or a group of killers stalking and murdering a group of people, usually by use of bladed or sharp tools. Although the term "slasher" may occasionally be used informally as a generic ...
s of the 1980s, in which
adolescent
Adolescence () is a transitional stage of human physical and psychological development that generally occurs during the period from puberty to adulthood (typically corresponding to the age of majority). Adolescence is usually associated w ...
s who had
sex, drank
alcoholic beverage
Drinks containing alcohol (drug), alcohol are typically divided into three classes—beers, wines, and Distilled beverage, spirits—with alcohol content typically between 3% and 50%. Drinks with less than 0.5% are sometimes considered Non-al ...
s, or smoked
marijuana
Cannabis (), commonly known as marijuana (), weed, pot, and ganja, List of slang names for cannabis, among other names, is a non-chemically uniform psychoactive drug from the ''Cannabis'' plant. Native to Central or South Asia, cannabis has ...
inevitably ended up as the victims of the
serial killer
A serial killer (also called a serial murderer) is a person who murders three or more people,An offender can be anyone:
*
*
*
*
* (This source only requires two people) with the killings taking place over a significant period of time in separat ...
villain
A villain (also known as a " black hat", "bad guy" or "baddy"; The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p.126 "baddy (also baddie) noun (pl. -ies) ''informal'' a villain or criminal in a book, film, etc.". the feminine form is villai ...
.
On the other hand, in the adolescent culture of the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
, for more than a hundred years the traditional cautionary tale gave rise to the phenomenon of
legend tripping, in which a cautionary tale is turned into the basis of a dare that invites the hearer to test the taboo by breaking it.
The cautionary tale has survived to the present day in another form, especially with the rise of modern mass media such as film and television; many
public service announcement
A public service announcement (PSA) is a message in the public interest disseminated by the media without charge to raise public awareness and change behavior. Oftentimes these messages feature unsettling imagery, ideas or behaviors that are des ...
s and
public information films frame themselves as cautionary tales regarding both societal issues and common dangers in modern life, pushing conformity by warning viewers of the danger and directing them towards avoiding the causes, or simply not doing actions that result in such dangers.
Reactions to cautionary tales
The genre of the cautionary tale has been satirized by several writers.
Hilaire Belloc in his ''
Cautionary Tales for Children'' presented such moral examples as "Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion", and "Matilda, Who told lies, and was Burned to Death".
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglicanism, Anglican deacon. His most notable works are ''Alice ...
, in ''
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (also known as ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English Children's literature, children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics university don, don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a ...
'', says that Alice:
In ''The Complete Tribune Printer'',
Eugene Field gave cautionary tales an ironic inversion, as in ''The Gun:''
Some films, such as ''
Gremlins'', satirized this framework by imposing very arbitrary rules whose violation results in horrendous consequences for the community by not taking responsibility.
Cautionary tales are sometimes heavily criticized for their ham-fisted approach to
ethics
Ethics is the philosophy, philosophical study of Morality, moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates Normativity, normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches inclu ...
. ''
The Cold Equations'' is a well-known example. In the story, a man has to eject a young woman out of the airlock, otherwise the fuel of his rocket will not suffice to deliver some badly needed serum, without which everyone at a small outpost would perish. Her death is justified because she ignored a 'no entry' sign, "when the laws of physics say no, they don't mean maybe", and no other solution would reduce the weight of the ship enough to complete the trip safely.
See also
*
Morphology (folkloristics)
*
Darwin Awards
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
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*
* {{cite journal , last1=White , first1=Beatrice , title=A Persistent Paradox , journal=Folklore , date=June 1972 , volume=83 , issue=2 , pages=122–131 , jstor=1259445 , doi=10.1080/0015587x.1972.9716461 , pmid=11614481
Folklore
Literary genres
Risk
Safety
Horror fiction