Author: Cristen Bobb

In terms of the basic definition, the story ” The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever is a gothic story because the events that happened in the story pushed the boundaries of a normal reality in the story, for example, the family recently got a new radio and while this radio was malfunctioning it started to project the conversations and events happening all around them through the radio and as the story continues the wife becomes invested in hearing all these stories even going as far as locking herself in a room with the radio, towards the end we start to see signs of the central gothic iorny as soon as the husband comes back from fixing the radio the sense of peacefulness and tranquility disappears the radio return to normal and the family begins to have arguments like how an everyday family would they are thrown back into a reality where households are messy and not perfect.

In my perspective “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman was the most interesting and enjoyable because after the first read-through I was left with so many unanswered questions that I had to go back through and read again, for example, I wondered what could drive a person so insane that they would think to burn down an entire house to get rid of a smell that only existed in their brain, or even sees full-blown people creeping back in forth on a plain wallpaper, to almost turning barbaric using her teeth to rip pieces of the wall off. In this story, it’s almost as if we’re seeing how insane a person can really go when they believe in a truth that is unreal/unworldly. You can even connect it to the world we live in today a lot of people believe different lies we see on social media and that leads to overthinking until it slowly consumes our thoughts and our everyday activities and when it gets to that point sadly it’ll be too late like the lady in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. We can learn from these stories and not over crowd our minds that can cause us to overthink to the point of self-sabotage.