Author: Mar Tenesaca

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.

Important ideas in Lloyd Smith’s, “What is American Gothic?”

1. Pg. 5: American Gothic explores extremes that include cruelty, rapacity, fear, passion, sexual degradation.
2. Pg. 5: The characters in American Gothic are “free thinking,” up to no good, disbelieve in the significance of virginity.
3. Pg. 6: American Gothic connects science occultist, pre-scientific doctrines.
4. Pg. 6 and 7: Other extreme states in the Gothic include suppressions of past trauma, past guilt, anxieties involving class and gender.
5. Pg. 7: Landscapes in American Gothic explores “inhuman and pitiless” nature such as mountains and wasteland.

My favorite story so far has been “A Story Told to Me by a Friend,” by Lydia Davis. My favorite aspect of this story is the fact that it is very short, yet conveys so much emotion. At the beginning, the men were simply strangers, and by the end of the first paragraph, they had come to realize their love. It was interesting to see two strangers fall in love over their interests. By this point I was excited to see if they would ever meet face-to-face and so when the friend made plans to fly out, I was excited to see the rest. Reading the phrase where there was no answer, I felt sad. Years of romance books and movies, it was the typical clue that something was wrong. Getting to the last paragraph and seeing that the friend had died, I actually gasped really loud. At the end, he realized that this would have been his life companion. Another thing I liked was that through it all, they were still referred to each other as “friends,” and that was nice to see because I think that when you love someone, then first and foremost you should be friends.