John Cheever’s story, “The Enormous Radio” demonstrates a lot of the emotions of a typical gothic storyline. For instance, cruelty, when Mr. Osborn is beating up his wife. There is lust or passion shown, in the case of the girl that Irene refers to as a “whore.” There is dread, that is a big emotion throughout the whole story where Irene hates everything she is listening to, she hates to see what her neighbors are really like, to wondering what the world around her is really like. One of the biggest gothic actions shown is dwelling in negativity, since Irene starts to only focus on the negativity, starts asking her husband questions about their life, trying to be different than the others. She knows that what she is doing is wrong, yet she purposely goes out of her way to sit down in the living room to listen in to her neighbor’s conversations, which can also be seen as doing the forbidden. Eventually, her emotions get out of hand, and her constant nagging at her husband also brings out the negative in her husband, who brings up all the negatives of her past, judging her as to the actions she had taken and now she is being judgy of everyone else.

The reason that “The Enormous Radio” would not classify as a gothic story would be because of setting. The setting of this story is a regular average home, with regular average people. Gothic settings tend to be castles, graves, forests, or anything involving darkness. Another difference of gothic stories is that there is no return to normalcy. After listening to her neighbor’s life, she starts to have doubts on people, starts acting differently and even her husband starts to notice the changes in the way that she is. It does not state in the story that Irene was able to go back to being the way she was in the beginning. She was a normal person, who lived a normal life, and now it is as if she lives her life paranoid. In a previous argument with her husband, they were able to calmly settle the argument. However, during the last argument, they end in a bitter note, with Irene’s husband yelling at her, which he had not done at any point in the past.