Cautionary Tale - Cautionary Tales and Conformity

Cautionary Tales and Conformity

Cautionary tales are ubiquitous in popular culture; 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 for fun 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 is momentarily excused from the ordinary demands of etiquette that discourages the use of gruesome or disgusting imagery because the tale serves to reinforce some other social taboo.

Those whose job it is to enforce conformity therefore frequently resort to cautionary tales. The German language 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 films 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 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 inevitably ended up as the victims of the serial killer villain.

On the other hand, in the adolescent culture of the United States, 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.