Cautionary tale

A cautionary tale is a traditional story told in folklore , to warn its hearer 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 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. The violator then comes toan unpleasant fate, which is frequently related in large and grisly detail.

Cautionary tales are ubiquitous in popular culture , so much sothat those who are aware of this conventional narrative framework will find them often. Many urban legends are framed as cautionary tales; from the lover's lane haunted by a hook-handed murderer to the tale of a man who shot a cactus forfun only to die when the plant toppled onto him. Like horror fiction generally, the cautionary tale exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards social taboos. The narrator of a cautionary tale ismomentarily excused from the ordinary demands of etiquette that discourages theuse of gruesome or disgusting imagery. The narrator gets an exemption, though, because the tale serves to reinforce some othersocial taboo.

Those whose job it is to enforce conformity therefore frequently resort to cautionary tales. Socialguidance films such as Boys Beware or Reefer Madness are deliberately patterned after traditional cautionarytales, as were the notorious driver education films of the 1960s , or military films about syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases . The framework of the cautionary tale became a cliché in the slasher films of the 1980s , in which adolescents who had sex , drank alcoholic beverages , or smoked marijuana inevitablyended up as the victims of the serial killer villain . Some films, such as Gremlins , satarized thisframework by imposing very arbitrary rules whose violation results in horrendous consequences for the community. " Klaatu barata nikto " in The Evil Dead is another example.

On the other hand, in the adolescent culture of the United States , formore 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 totest the taboo by breaking it.

The genre of the cautionary tale has been satirized by many writers. Hilaire Belloc in his Cautionary Tales for Children, presented such moral exemplars as "Jim, Whoran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion", and "Matilda, Who told lies, and was Burned to Death". Lewis Carroll , in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , says that Alice

had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasantthings, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hotpoker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usuallybleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," it is almost certain to disagree withyou, sooner or later.

In The Complete Tribune Printer , EugeneField gave cautionary tales an ironic inversion, as in The Gun:

This is a gun. Is the Gun loaded? Really, I do not know. Let us Find out. Put the Gun on the table, and you, Susie, blow downone barrel,while you, Charlie, blow down the other. Bang! Yes, it was loaded. Run quick, Jennie, and pick up Susie's head andCharlies lower Jaw before the Nasty Blood gets over the New carpet.