Paid Out: What Happens in Good Stories

SIR RICHARD CARLISLE
Who'd've thought it? The cold and careful Lady Mary Crawley. Well, we know better now. I'm surprised you haven't given me some extenuating circumstances.

LADY MARY
I have none. I was foolish, and I was paid out for my folly.

       

          Good stories usually hurt.  When you read them, you identify with the character and beg her to choose rightly because you can see the train wreck coming.  In good stories, words, attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors have consequences.  Have you ever groaned when you've read of Samson giving away his secret by inches to Delilah?  Do you feel like kicking King Rehoboam when he takes his lap of luxury and throws it to the wind?  Do you then remember your own little teeny commits or omits and shudder to think you might have a price to pay?  

           In 2011 and 2012 I read Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and I watched Downton Abbey.  It takes Scarlett until the end of the book to finally be able to see herself for what she really has been.  Together with her, our hearts wrench to think of life we may have wasted.  Lady Mary Crawley understood herself a little sooner than Scarlett, but that might have to do with being a television show.  Heroines from Jane Austen sometimes learn their morals from books and observation, but their moments of personal decision come when they have to sacrifice temporary pleasure for the long term benefit.   Look for both good and bad consequences when you take in stories.  It is a good story when it teaches you a realistic, maybe not politically-correct understanding of righteousness... without preaching.

"I was foolish,
and I was paid out for my folly."
-Lady Mary