The Controller of Life (Gossip)

The art of gossip can be very hurtful and untruthful. When someone decides to start gossiping rumors start and things start to get skewed from person to person. This is seen during the clip from Doubt when the priest is talking. He tells a lady to go home after she has gossiped about someone in her community and to go on her roof, to cut up a pillow and she does. When she goes back to the priest after she had cut up the pillow, he asks her what happened when she cut up the pillow, and she says feathers. He then tells her to go and collect all the feathers that have fallen from the pillow that went with the wind. She says that is not possible and that she does not know where all the feathers went. He then tells her thats gossip, and its very true. When you tell someone something, you have no clue who they are going to go and tell, and you don't know how they will view the story and how they will explain the story. In To Kill A Mocking Bird, the art of gossip affects Boo Radley a lot. When Scout hears stories about him, she hears all about how he has stabbed his parents and how he eats his cats. She has no proof of these things, but being a young child she believes everything she hears and she talks about everything she hears. With the problems of gossip in the town, people get a wrong view of other people and they start to make assumptions. Scout and her brother Jem, act very immature at times when they imitate the Radley family, over the summer. They base all the gossip they hear around the skits and this puts thoughts into their heads before they can even really know anything about Boo. This is similar to the clip from Doubt, when the priest tells the lady to go to her roof and cut up the pillow. All the feathers are the adults and children in the community and how they hear one thing and they spread that idea around and put their own thoughts about it on the story. With no one knowing anything about Boo exactly they all think he is some big mean guy, who easily could be a very nice man, who just has very strict parents. Gossip is a simple part of life though, and everyone goes through it. With Scout being a young child, she is first experiencing gossip, and it his taking a huge part of her. She is oblivious to the things that she is doing and saying about other people, and she doesn't understand the control of one's words. Also she makes assumptions about everything she hears and skews that into her on way and then she makes judgements from the things she hears, which somethings she is not supposed to hear at all. Another thing that causes a problem with her being so young, is she does not have a huge vocabulary. So when someone says something, she may not understand what they are saying but she still repeats those things and she also takes offense to them sometimes.