Gaslighting in Global Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture
The term “gaslighting” has reentered the popular lexicon with a vengeance in recent years, appearing in countless news stories and opinion pieces on the subjects of sex, race, politics, medicine, and emotional abuse. It refers to “the experience of having your reality repeatedly challenged by someone who holds more power than you do,” as one Washington Postcolumn recently articulated it. Such pieces often note that the term is drawn from a specific twentieth-century source text: George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight, based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play of the same name, which tells the story of a sadistic husband actively working to make his wife believe she is losing her mind.