Urban Legends: Modern Morality Tales

The legend of the stranger with the scapel.

A man goes off on a business trip overseas. One night, in his hotel lobby, he gets chatted up by one of the most beautiful women he has ever met. After one too many drinks they retire to his room. The next morning, he wakes up in the bath, covered in ice. Beside him is a phone with a note to call emergency services or he will die. When the paramedics arrive and check him out, he is told he is the victim of an organ trafficking gang and one of his kidneys has been taken.

The moral of this story: strangers can never be trusted, especially foreigners. The subtext implies that this would not have happened if he had stayed home and foregone the business trip. Like the spider story, travel may have unexpected consequences and people outside your community (or country) will only hurt you. There is “us and there is “them”. They are deceptive and untrustworthy. If you cannot stay within your geographical boundaries at least stay within your moral boundaries or you will pay the penalty.

Snow White in her coffin, Theodor Hosemann, 1852: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SnowWhite.png

The morals of the tales above are reflections of the following sample from the collections of the Brothers Grimm. I grew up with my grandmother’s late 1800s version of Grimm’s fairy tales. The stories and engravings are some of the most horrific things you can see, but if you read the originals – you see the morals.  Rapunzel is banished and her prince is blinded because of her unwed motherhood, after the controlling measures of the witch (or godmother) fail. Like in the tale of the hook, it is better to submit to the overprotective rules of society. In Snow White the wicked mother, not stepmother, abandons seven year old Snow White in the forest tries to kill Snow White three times (corset, comb and apple) and later has to dance in heated iron shoes until death. There is no kiss for Snow White before marriage. The vanity of both mother and daughter is emphasized and the mother is punished for her unnatural behaviour towards her daughter – for not being a proper woman – as it in the spider’s nest story. Red Riding Hood is clearly a tale to remind us that we are safe in our community but not outside it.  In some adaptations, Red even gets into bed with the wolf that is dressed in grandmother’s clothes, mirroring the businessman getting drunk taking the stranger to his room. In the pre-Grimm French version, the wolf eats the girl and grandmother and there is no rescue by a woodsman or hunter. Don’t talk to strangers in literal form or you may pay with your life, as the businessman in the bath nearly did.

There is an underlying theme in the above legends: stray from the correct path and risk the consequences. They remind the intended reader to know their place, to know what behaviour is expected of them.

As to the alligator – I once had a friend in Florida who released his pet alligator ……