Larry Wolff, The New York Review of Books, 22 July 2021 The series includes Sloan’s famous etching of a woman kneeling in her nightgown while turning down a gaslight before joining her lover amid the rumpled sheets of their bed.
2022 In discussing these books, Wolff explores the profound impact of gaslight and the development of projection technologies on opera.
Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books, 6 Apr. 2022 So Dickens says, on this day when the sun seems to have died, and the haggard glow of gaslight can barely brighten the mist. David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 5 Sep. 2023 Davis captures the exterior scenes (shot on Inishmore, in the Aran Islands) in somber natural light, with candles and gaslight for the interiors, as befits an area where electricity would not have arrived until the 1970s. Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 29 Apr. Noun But these images are also stagy and contrived, as if his birds are players on a stage, dramatically illuminated in the glow of gaslight. Its increasing use in many contexts contributed to making gaslighting Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2022. Unlike lying, which tends to be between individuals, and fraud, which tends to involve organizations, gaslighting applies in both personal and political contexts, and is found in formal and technical writing as well as in colloquial use. The idea of a deliberate conspiracy to mislead has made gaslighting useful in describing lies that are part of a larger plan. In this use, the word is at home with other terms relating to modern forms of deception and manipulation, such as fake news and deepfake. In the current century, the word has come to refer also to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage” (sense 2). When gaslighting was first used in the mid-20th century, it referred to a kind of deception like that in the plots mentioned above (sense 1). His mysterious activities in the attic cause the house’s gas lights to dim, but he insists to his wife that the lights are not dimming and that she can’t trust her own perceptions. The origins of gaslighting are colorful: the term comes from the title of a 1938 play and the movies based on that play, the plots of which involve a man attempting to make his wife believe that she is going insane. ‘I’m sure they said that they would come tonight… but then again, my brain is mad so I’m probably wrong.’ It truly feels as though you’re going insane, and the irony, of course, is that you are the one who holds the truth.The Origin and Semantic Development of Gaslighting “You become so dependent on the gaslighter that you start to gaslight yourself before believing the truth about a situation. “Gaslighting isn’t lying, it’s more sinister,” Humphries tells me. And by misusing gaslighting as a term, we undermine the very word that’s designed to describe a pattern of undermining behavior. We’re not talking about straightforward fibbing here it’s far more devious and manipulative than that. At the risk of sounding humorless, it’s not all that funny when you consider the abuse it’s meant to describe.
Too often we substitute “liar” for “gaslighter.” We use it as an easy insult or joke when our partner claims we didn’t tell them to take the garbage out. (She never names him, so neither will I.)Īnd she’s right. Because the term gaslighting is, as the actress Rebecca Humphries has put it, at risk of being “watered down.” Humphries is the author of the genre-changing book Why Did You Stay? about the impact of being gaslit by her ex, a certain comedian who was caught cheating on her with his Strictly Come Dancing partner and recently visited the Australian jungle. (While it can happen to anyone, research has shown that gaslighting is mostly used as a form of emotional abuse in heterosexual relationships by men towards women.)īut a note of caution. It’s death by a thousand tiny cuts, the likes of which are being inflicted on women quietly, insidiously, and behind closed doors constantly. It’s not a single seismic headline-grabbing moment. Unlike previous years, there wasn’t a single world event that prompted the spike in searches and led to it becoming “word of the year.” But we shouldn’t be surprised. The dictionary broadly defines gaslighting as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage.” Merriam-Webster has just made “gaslighting” its word of the year, after searches rose by 1,740 percent in the last 12 months, and it was looked up multiple times, every single day. It seems as though more of us want the answers to these questions than ever. Perhaps you are a crazy psycho bitch and have misread the situation? Maybe you do overthink. The self-doubt over what-until just now-you absolutely knew to be true. Wondering whether you might be overreacting after all. Anyone who has ever been gaslit will remember the feeling.
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