I suppose I must have

In​ the TV drama Bad Sisters, set in Dublin, four sisters conspire to murder their brother-in-law John Paul, an abusive monster who is married to their beloved sister, Grace. The dynamics of the marriage are clear from the pilot. It’s Christmas Day and tradition has it that the siblings meet at Forty Foot – a swimming spot just south of Dublin – for a dip. But John Paul doesn’t want his wife to go. To keep her at home, he brings her a glass of champagne when she is getting ready. Grace is surprised, and touched, at the gesture. ‘You deserve it,’ John Paul says. ‘Drink up.’ Minutes later, as Grace is about to leave, he appears, feigning shock. ‘What are you doing? You just had a glass of champagne, you can’t drive, are you kidding me? Come on now, think.’ A glazed, cowering look comes over Grace as she protests that she’s fine, completely fine. Or, if he insists, he can drive her to Forty Foot. ‘Of course I can’t. I had a glass myself.’ She begins to look frantic, while John Paul holds firm: ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I just worry too much.’ Grace defiantly opens the door. He slams it shut, grazing her hand. ‘Why would you go and make a scene,’ he says, ‘on Christmas Day?’ Grace gives in. She texts her sisters: ‘My fault. Too much to drink.’

The scene is a helpful introduction to the concept of gaslighting, in which the abuser manipulates the victim and then convinces them that they are at fault (‘I’m not making a scene, you’re making a scene’). The usual techniques are ridiculing the victim and making deliberately confusing and misleading statements. Anger is quickly succeeded by excessive affection or concern – a technique known as ‘love-bombing’ – which further undermines the victim. George Cukor’s 1944 film noir Gaslight, based on the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, inspired the term, though it took some time to gain ground. Psychoanalytical scholarship first mentioned ‘the gaslight phenomenon’ in the late 1960s. In 1981, two doctors, Victor Calef and Edward Weinshel, gave an account of gaslighting in Psychoanalytic Quarterly: the ‘victimiser’, they wrote, tries ‘to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy, and the victim more or less complies’. As Kate Abramson explains in her new book, On Gaslighting, the gaslighter

doesn’t just want other people to think his target is wrong. He wants her protests framed as ‘oversensitive’, ‘paranoid’, ‘acting out’ and ‘rants’. The more he succeeds, the less she will be able to engage in the relevant acts of telling, of protesting and so on … But the silencing involved in gaslighting is actually much worse than this … The gaslighter wants the target to see herself in the terms he paints her.

In Gaslight Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer play Paula and Gregory, a newly married couple in 1880s London. Gregory, we soon learn, wants to see Paula carted off to ‘the madhouse’. To accomplish this, he plants his pocket watch in her handbag, then comments on its absence before supposedly discovering it in her bag. He moves a painting, then convinces Paula that she moved it. She reads aloud to him a letter addressed to her aunt; he later maintains that the letter never existed. He gives her a brooch, which mysteriously disappears (he ‘forgives’ her for losing it). Cukor keeps the camera tightly focused on Bergman’s anguished face as she cries out, again and again, ‘I didn’t! I swear I didn’t,’ before her protests give way to self-doubt and depression. ‘I suppose I must have.’ Each time she gives in, Gregory’s face flashes with something like arousal. ‘Yes. YES,’ he says. ‘That’s right: you’re imagining things.’

Gregory’s chief motivation isn’t sadism but jewels, in particular a stash hidden in the attic of their house, which Paula inherited from her murdered opera-singer aunt. We discover that jewel-lust isn’t new to Gregory. Indeed, he strangled Paula’s aunt after failing to retrieve the stash and then hatched a plan to marry her heir. She had hidden the jewels well, however, and it takes months – long enough to break a just-married girl’s mind – for Gregory to ferret out his treasure. He only has a moment to savour his success before Scotland Yard arrives. ‘I don’t ask you to understand me,’ he says to Paula: ‘Between us all the time were those jewels, like a fire in my brain, a fire that separated us.’ That’s all right, then.

The ‘gaslight’ of the title refers to the lamps in the house which grow dim every evening when Gregory leaves for work (in reality, to search for the diamonds in the attic), but this isn’t part of his plan: he doesn’t realise that he’s diverting the house’s gas supply to the attic, something a canny police detective eventually works out. The gaslight is what gives him away. It is the only unintentional part of the infernal treatment to which Bergman’s character is subjected, and the one she knows for sure she isn’t imagining. Gaslight is what undermines Gregory’s gaslighting.

Gaslight has been useful for thinking with, despite the pretext of the jewels, because it holds the potential for more sinister and less explicit readings. The diamonds represent something even more covetable: Paula’s mind. Will he finally have her in the palm of his hand? The answer appears to be yes; her final swoon is almost orgasmic. But she recovers at once, and turns the tables on Gregory, who has been tied to a chair by the cops. ‘How can a mad woman help her husband to escape?’ she asks, in mock simplicity. When he asks for a knife, she gets one, but withholds it: ‘Are you suggesting that this is a knife I hold in my hand? Have you gone mad, my husband?’ Nor is she done with her revenge: ‘If I were not mad,’ she tells him, ‘I could have helped you … But because I am mad … I’m rejoicing in my heart, without a shred of pity, without a shred of regret, watching you go with glory in my heart!’

The distance between Gaslight and Bad Sisters is almost eighty years and no hidden treasure is now required to explain the desire to undermine another person’s self-possession. People gaslight those close to them for the same reason that, say, husbands rape their wives – because they can. At the same time, the concept of gaslighting has become a popular heuristic for forms of psychic domination, real or imagined, beyond personal relations: Obama’s ‘gaslight presidency’ (Wall Street Journal), Donald Trump’s ‘gaslighting of the world’ (Washington Post) or pro-transgender activists’ supposed ‘gaslighting of Americans’ (Daily Signal). This seems to me no bad thing, but according to Abramson we shouldn’t use the term in this way. ‘I want to urge that we not broaden our conception of gaslighting to include such social-structural issues under a new subcategory of “structural gaslighting”,’ she writes. Rather, we should use the term only to denote interpersonal interactions, because while ‘oppressive social structures can play an extremely significant role’ in gaslighting, it is ultimately ‘not something the social structures do but something people do with those social structures’. She grants that the ‘self-disguising features … of subjugating systems’ are pervasive and pernicious – for example, the bind of apparently benevolent racism or sexism, or the hermeneutical injustice of lacking the language to describe your abuse. But Abramson would reject, for instance, the argument of writers such as Reni Eddo-Lodge or Zoé Samudzi that Black people (and Black women in particular) are ‘gaslit’ in white majority societies, or accept that what the philosopher Sukaina Hirji describes as ‘oppressive double binds’ – those ‘situations where no matter what an agent does, they become a mechanism in their own oppression’ – qualify as gaslighting. If we want to save ‘what’s distinctive (interpersonally and morally) about the phenomenon for the sake of which the term was coined in the first place’, she insists, we have to conceptualise such dynamics ‘as something other than gaslighting’. As she sees it, ‘people gaslight, social structures don’t,’ and pretending otherwise only ‘conceals the fact that individual people are here the proper loci of moral responsibility’.

The first mistake here is to see the expansion of the term as letting individuals off the hook, when in fact it allows us to identify dissembling and manipulation in a wider range of contexts. Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim on his behalf – that it is his critics who are lying, whose actions have consequences. In emphasising private dynamics and interpersonal relationships, Abramson lets all of us off the hook. One could argue that we’re all complicit in gaslighting, that we all feel its allure, whether the gaslighter is Trump or Hannibal Lecter.

It is also reasonable to ask whether Abramson’s ‘subjugating systems’ are really that different from people. In the US, corporations have been granted many of the same rights as citizens. If Meta™ is a ‘person’ in the view of the courts, why shouldn’t we critique its behaviour in similar terms? Companies and institutions are capable of engaging in behaviours equivalent to those between individuals even if they don’t possess the rights granted by US legislators. In 2017, residents of Sarnia, a town of 70,000 people near Detroit, saw flames engulfing the Imperial Oil refinery. A spokesman said there was nothing to worry about: some gas had been burned off so an ‘internal issue’ could be resolved. But fires continued to flare up. ‘Nothing is happening,’ Imperial said. ‘There is a small grass fire; it was put out.’ Residents queried this but were met with silence. The refinery is near the Canadian border and the Canadian ministry of the environment looked into the fire and noted the refinery’s ‘unstable operating conditions’ and a loss of ‘air supply resulting in the shut-down of several processing units within the refinery’. But Imperial Oil wasn’t charged with anything, no environmental impact data were released and residents were unable to find out any more about what had happened.

Abramson isn’t interested in the ways interpersonal relationships are shaped by institutions. Marriage is itself a ‘structure’, even if it’s individuals who are held accountable for violence. Society and the law grant parents responsibilities and rights over their children. This duality hasn’t cramped social movements. Feminists and other social critics have always interrogated individuals and structures at the same time, recognising that social structures are nothing more than amassed human subjectivity. Activists like to remind us that behind corporate façades are powerful individuals with names and addresses, even though their broader complaint is with ‘capitalism’, ‘white supremacy’ or ‘Zionism’.

Discussions of Gaslight rarely mention how alive and attractive Gregory’s fire, or desire, makes him, and the allure that the jewels – and therefore control over Paula – hold for him isn’t discussed in Abramson’s book. Nor is the attraction the audience might feel for him, though this seems to me central to the power of the movie and to the wider cultural interest in the phenomenon. For Abramson’s purposes, gaslighting is always monstrous and clearly gendered: with few exceptions, it is a man who gaslights and a woman who is gaslit. This schema leaves little room for the more uncomfortable considerations that other philosophers have explored in work on ‘white feminist gaslighting’, nor does it help us get to the heart of what, in the interpersonal context she favours, might make a person vulnerable to gaslighting and attracted to someone who engages in it.

Abramson’s reminder that harmful behaviour need not be conscious to be intentional is a further reason to accept that systems of social relations and modes of production or reproduction may indeed ‘gaslight’ us. In any case, her plea seems peculiarly depoliticising at a time when more people than ever before are using the term ‘gaslit’ to talk about media norms and cultural hegemonies. As Leslie Jamison notes in the New Yorker, ‘the popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm.’ The term can be used cynically, of course, and its application questioned, but it usefully encompasses such PR and political strategies as misdirection, not-quite-lying, overemphasising, outright lying, bluster and defiance.

Nikhil Pal Singh, a professor at NYU, recently tweeted about ‘the upside down, gaslit world that we inhabit’, one in which politicians worry about antisemitic pogroms on the Upper West Side even as ‘actual mass Palestinian graves are uncovered under hospitals in Gaza and Israel invades Rafah.’ Shortly after Columbia University called riot cops on its pro-Palestinian students, the human rights lawyer Noura Erakat shared her frustration at the ‘gaslighting that this is about Jewish safety’. ‘In what universe do the police protect a racialised minority? It’s not true now or ever.’ Writing in the journal Political Quarterly, the political scientists Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan argued that gaslighting was characteristic of ‘anti-Palestinian racism’, pointing to the denial of the Nakba and to the common ‘political narrative of the Israeli state … that it is a “democracy” – a designation frequently used to gaslight those who challenge Israeli apartheid’. Meanwhile, Joe Biden seems to be gaslighting us over his Gaza policy – ‘I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody’ – as well as over his capacity to govern.

Successful gaslighting creates helplessness and inertia, but it seems to me that we are in danger of giving gaslighters too much power. It is significant, I think, that it’s Grace herself who murders John Paul at the end of Bad Sisters. Abramson usefully describes the depression resulting from gaslighting as the victim’s ‘last form of resistance’. If you can still wish things were otherwise, or mourn what once was, you aren’t entirely lost.