Gossip: A Small Town Epidemic?

In A Rose For Emily the story is told from the eyes of the neighbors, and this is how you get all your information. I feel this makes the description of Emily very unreliable and biased. When you think about rumours and gossip the story rarely stays truthful and the same from person to person. Yet Gossip is something to do in a small town, where there may be nothing else entertaining to do, so the community makes up stories. Also in small towns everyone knows everyone else but if they don't then this is where the rumors start, to pretend like they know everything about the person. In a small town community it is a proud thing for a person to tell someone visiting the whole life story of a certain person in town. Yet Emily brings about difficulty to this because she does not open up in the small town, so in order to fill the void the townspeople create a story for her. Rumors and gossip remind me of a game called "Chinese Telephone" where one thing is said in the beginning and as the statement is passed from one person to another the statement starts to differ. This must also be true with Emily's story, as it is told more and more the story must change and Emily's story starts to become less and less reliable coming from the townspeople. The townspeople make it a point to reiterate "Poor Emily" but who knews if she was happy or not, shee never talked to anyone. The townspeople created their own emotions for Emily as they saw fit to tell. This is the small town epidemic, as one person talks about someone in the community it becomes the subject of the day, week, month etc. Miss. Emily being so mysterious and enclosed, the townspeople keep the subject of Miss. Emily for awhile because they could talk about each day of her life as they imagined it was happening.