Cautionary Tale - Reactions To Cautionary Tales

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, 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 unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison", it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later."

In The Complete Tribune Printer, Eugene Field 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 down one barrel while you, Charlie, blow down the other. Bang! Yes, it was loaded. Run quick, Jennie, and pick up Susie's head and Charlies lower Jaw before the Nasty Blood gets over the New carpet.

Some films, such as Gremlins, satirized this framework by imposing very arbitrary rules whose violation results in horrendous consequences for the community.

Cautionary tales are sometimes heavily criticized for their ham-fisted approach to ethics. The Cold Equations is a well-known example. In the story, a man has to eject a young woman out of the airlock, otherwise his rocket will not have enough fuel 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.