Author: Izabella Lopez

The story “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever can be considered gothic for many reasons. This story has many gothic actions. For example, it includes acting irrational when Irene chooses to continue to listen in on peoples conversations even though it’s causing her to become in sort “crazy” and is morally wrong. This can also be considered dwelling in negativity because Irene keeps on listening to the radio even though it is just arguments between couples and eventually puts a strain on her marraige to Jim. Gothic emotions are also shown in this story such as cruelty, violence, and shock. These emotions are shown, for example, when Irene hears the couple that is arguing and hears the husband hutting his wife. Also in the end when Jim and Irene are arguing and Jim talks about Irene having an abortion and acting like she didn’t care. That would be considered cruel and shocking. At the end of the story we have a return to normalcy when Irene and Jim began to argue and this is also very ironic because througout the story Irene listens in on all these other couples arguing and thinks her marriage is perfect but in the end her marriage is shown to not be perfect at all and she has many of the issues these other people had.

“The Enormous Radio” can also be considered not gothic. One reason i would say this story can be considered not gothic is because of the setting. A story that is gothic is usually set somewhere more eerie or sinsiter like old houses, castles, and dark spaces. But this story is set in a normal apartment building that has nothing uncanny about it. It is a normal building full of families and couples.

1. Gothics representation of extreme circumstances of terror, oppression and persecution, darkness and obscurity of setting, and innocence betrayed… – pg1
2. Rather than a simple matter of imitation and adaption, substituting the wilderness and the city for the subterranean rooms and corridors of the monastery, or the remote house for the castle, dark and dangerous woods for the bandit infested mountains of italy, certain unique cultural pressures led amercans to the gothic as an expression of their cery different conditions – pg2
3. Strict interpreters of the Gothic as a genre would perhaps agree with Maurice Levy’s insistence that the true periodof Gothiv, and its cultrual, aesthetic, religious, and political background, was from about 1764 to 1824, the period of the first Gothic Revival and the culture of Georgian England. Levy acknowledges however that the term has now become of much broader application and popular understanding…- pg2
4. Hallmarks of the Gothic include a pushing toward extremes and excess, and that, of course, implies an investigation of limits. In exploring extremes, whether of cruelty, rapacity and fear of passion and sexual degredation, the Gothic tends to reinforce, if only in a novels final pages, culturally prescribed doctrines of morality and propriety. -pg3
5. Gothic interest in extreme states and actions can also be seen to correlate with widespread social anxieties and feares. Significant amoung these are fears having to do with the suppressions of past traumas and guilt, anxieties concering class and gender, fear of revolutin, worries about the developing powers of science; an increaseing suspicion that empire and colonial experience might bring home an unwanted legacy; post-Darwinian suggestions of possible regression or atavism; and displaces version of the dread occasioned by syphallis, or much later, by AIDS

After reading all of these short stories I feel like I enjoyed “The Lottery” the most. I felt as though It was the most enjoyable because at first, you think It’s one thing when in the end It’s the complete opposite. There are so many things in the beginning that you think are sweet and cute but in the end, you find out the true horrifying reason that those things were done. In the beginning, I thought that It was going to be just a nice community lottery where maybe someone wins a prize or something. Everyone seemed so happy to be there the way they were interacting with their neighbors as if it was just another day. They even wanted to just speed things up so they can get back to their day. But in the end, you figure out that the lottery is just to see who in their town gets stoned to death. This story threw me through so many emotions from start to end. At the start, you feel happy and even calm at the descriptions of the day and how everyone is gathering in the town. But as the story comes closer to the end you start to realize that this is not what it seems. When Bill Hutchinson “wins” and his wife Tessie starts to argue that he wasn’t given enough time or it wasn’t fair this made me realize that this is not something good nor sweet. My emotions switched from happiness to confusion. I wonder if It’s not what I thought It was then what can it be? As I move on I finally get an answer to the question when they mention that pile of stones that the boys had made at the very beginning of the story and I now know that the was just a lottery to pick who gets stoned to death. This is when I feel sad and even horrified that a town that seemed so sweet could have a tradition so grim. This story throws you through so many twists and turns throughout and leaves you with so many questions as you’re reading and that’s why I liked It the best.