Songyi Yuan Ms.

Szeles ENG3UG Due: 2013-01-11 Connected Communities of Small Towns Life in a small town can be imagined as# an utopia encased in a thin plastic bubble. In his novel Fifth Business, Robertson Davies reveals what makes small town life seem like a paradise. Residents of small towns adopt a sheltered lifestyle that cherishes a closely-knit community over accepting outside change. A small town is a stable society based off of individual trust. The residents have a naive lifestyle due to the towns static social mores, and this leads to the inhabitants to become hostile towards outsiders. In the small town of Deptford, all the residents know each other on a first-name basis. This closely-knit community passes news along in the form of gossip. When protagonist Dunstable Ramsay returns to Deptford from the war, he receives all of this recent news from the local barber, Milo as factual gossip#. The prurient, the humiliating, and the macabre (pronounced maa-cau-bra) were Milos principal areas of enthusiasm, and we explored them all (Davies 95). Since news gets passed along as rumors, members of the Deptford community had to have trust in each other. Citizens of the small town of Deptford are ignorant of the changing morals of the global society. By tapping into the syrup of the children# of Deptford, one can reveal how Davies demonstrates that the culture of a small town is shaped by experience, not by change. While attending the war procession in his honour, Dunstable is shocked at a group of children chanting alongside absent minded adults about war events. Then the cheers were loud, and the children hopped and scampered round the foot of the flagpole, shouting, Hang the Kaiser! with growing hysteria; some of them were much too small to know what hanging was, or what a Kaiser might be, but I cannot call them innocent, for they were being as vicious as their age and experience allowed (92). Even though they are just children, one can deduce that small town life is one that revolves around following what adults are doing, not wondering what the war actually is. All actions are static and stay within the community. In his book Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community, Arthur Vidich uncovers change in small town life. His main proof on how small towns are adaptable are their focus on time and history. ...[It is] difficult to present Springfield without historical background ... the attention to a time dimension provides an important mechanism for seeing the community in dynamic rather than static terms (Vidich 3-5). Vidich is referring to a modern-day rural environment and how it tries to be known as an ever-changing part of society as opposed to the isolated environment that exists in Fifth Businesss Deptford. People from outside of a small towns community is not well received by residents. Local inhabitants prefer to preserve their society just the way it is, and not tainted by outside influence. Within Fifth Business, migrant Mary Dempster is frowned upon by locals as a housewife who could not support her family and spent her days giving to the community. ... [Mrs. Dempster] would spend a whole morning wandering from house to house-traipsing was the word many of the women now used ... Her face wore a sweet but woefully un-Deptford expression; it was too clear that she did not know where she was going next (35). Note that local women criticise Mary Dempsters kindness as it does not fit the norm of Deptford. In an analysis of todays small towns, one can see that this fear of social deviants are much less of a problem. Through an article published by the University of New Hampshire, Mr. Kenneth Johnson point out that ever since

the late 1990s, the majority of nonmetropolitan areas throughout America are inhabited by multicultural migrants. This mores shift of accepting new cultural ideas is because of the demographic shift of small towns from a traditional association with farmers to less wealthy citizens who have been hit by the economic recession. (Johnson) In modern day small towns, outsiders are embraced instead of being greeted with hostility. Small town life is dynamic in the sense that residents of the town are so interconnected and trustworthy of one another, that everything is shared and passed along. Though this may keep town members innocent and isolated from the rest of society, any introduction of unfamiliar people or lifestyles faces opposition. The safeguarded lifestyle of small town residents will appreciate a closely-knit community and will result to turmoil defend its purity. What would happen if a foreign body bursts the bubble#? POP#! Goes the paradise.

Works Cited Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. Toronto: Penguin Group Canada, 1970. Print. Johnson, Kenneth M., "Demographic trends in rural and small town America" (2006). The Carsey Institute at the Scholars' Repository. Paper 5. <http://scholars.unh.edu/carsey/5> Vidich, Arthur. Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community. rev. ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 3-5. Print.