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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. Inhis 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 town‟s static social mores, andthis 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 thelocal barber, Milo as factual gossip#. “The prurient, the humiliating, and the macabre

( pronounced maa-cau-bra) were Milo‟s principal areas of enthusiasm, and we explored them

all” (Davies 95). Since news gets passed along as rumors, members of the Deptford communityhad 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. Whileattending 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 growinghysteria; 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. Allactions 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 knownas an ever-changing part of society as opposed to the isolated environment that exists in Fifth

 Business‟s Deptford. People from outside of a small town‟s 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 tooclear that she did not know where she was going next” (35). Note that local women criticise

Mary Dempster‟s kindness as it does not fit the norm of Deptford. In an analysis of today‟s 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

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the late 1990‟s, 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 wealthycitizens 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 interconnectedand trustworthy of one another, that everything is shared and passed along. Though this maykeep 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 wouldhappen 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.