As many folks probably know by now, “gaslighting” is the Merriam-Webster 2022 Word of the Year. It’s become a cultural touchstone, a commonplace term. Defined as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one's own advantage,” gaslighting typically applies to the actions of manipulative, abusive men, often in romantic relationship settings. What is less known is the asylum context of the word.
The term references a 1944 movie (based on a 1938 play), Gaslight. Starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, this noir classic relates a tale of deception and abuse. In the film, Boyer, playing an insidious lothario, manipulates Bergman’s character to fall in love with him in order to access her family home and the jewel hidden within it. He is a very bad character indeed. Not only has he killed the woman’s aunt earlier, but as her husband, he does all he can to make her think she is losing her mind. One of his tactics is to dim the gaslights, and then act as if she is only imagining that the lights are going down.
The film is tough to watch. The audience knows Boyer’s character is a manipulator and sympathizes with Bergman as she is relentlessly tortured. Finally, it looks as though Boyer might win. He tells Bergman that her mother went mad and was sent to an asylum when she was a baby, and then implies this is where she is headed herself. He says that he will soon get doctors to see her, ominously explaining, “I believe two is the required number.” In the period when the film was set, two doctors were needed to confirm mental incarceration. The villain wants to send his poor wife to the madhouse.
In 1944, film audiences would be familiar with this classic villainous ruse. For well over a century at this point, memoirs, movies, and fictional stories depicted sane women being “railroaded” to asylums at the behest of scheming husbands. It was a very well-known trope. Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman in 1798, readers had been treated to horror stories of “inconvenient” women getting sent away to horrid, dungeon-like asylums by husbands and ruthless male relatives.
In Maria, the titular character is entombed in a “mansion of despair” after trying to flee her abusive husband. In a “private madhouse,” she finds herself subject to listening to “groans and shrieks” through the wall, rotting away in her “dreary cell,” essentially “blotted out of existence.”
Wollstonecraft’s novel remained unfinished in her lifetime; she died due to complications of giving birth to her daughter Mary (who would herself create another character of interest to the asylum, Frankenstein). Published posthumously, Maria became the first of many tales, true and fictional, of women who thought they were in safe relationships with men, only to turn out to be monsters. The power dynamic in every case is clear—a woman has little chance against a patriarch who can ask a few doctors (also men) to have them declared mad and sent away.
Other books and short stories followed, using essentially the same plot device. To name a few, there is Elizabeth Stone’s A Sketch of the Life of Elizabeth T. Stone, and of Her Persecutions (1841), Lillie Devereux Blake’s Southwold (1859), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Luisa May Alcott’s short story “A Whisper in the Dark” (1863), Elizabeth Packard’s The Prisoner's Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). The trope extended throughout the twentieth century.
The strength of this trope lies in the disparity of power that underlies it—women finding themselves possessed of fewer rights and less social power, and thus becoming vulnerable to manipulation and mental incarceration. This made Gaslight a haunting and extremely powerful film. Indeed, the movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards (winning two) and was a big hit for its studio.
THE BASICS- What Is Gaslighting?
- Take our Gaslighting Test
- Find a therapist who understands manipulative behavior
Gaslighting is a useful term that describes a common, malicious manipulation tactic. Understanding the historical, literary background of female mental incarceration helps us to see the source of its power.