Some believe it was Donald Trump that helped push it into the mainstream, with his tendency to make incendiary statements and then deny having ever said them – a habit that the media started describing, controversially, as “gaslighting”.
The New York Times first used the term in 1995, but it was barely used again for the next 20 years. Thanks to Gaslight, this brutal form of emotional and psychological abuse has been given a name, but one that has only recently entered common parlance. “If I were not mad, I could have helped you,” she says with relish. When Gregory is arrested, he tries to convince Paula to help him escape. As Paula grows more and more distressed, he twists that against her, too – “Paula you silly child” “Paula, stop being hysterical” “Please control yourself” – until even she is convinced that she is losing her mind. He openly flirts with the maid (Angela Lansbury in her film debut), and turns her against his wife. “I hope you’re not starting to imagine things again,” he says with faux concern, using her supposedly troubled mind as an excuse to bar her from seeing any visitors or leaving the house. He starts removing more objects from around the house and accusing her of hiding them. He gives his wife a precious brooch, only to trick her into thinking she’s lost it. Funnily enough, the “gaslight” of the title was not the method of manipulation, but a vital clue to its discovery.īergman plays Paula, a young woman whose new husband Gregory (French-American actor Charles Boyer) begins a campaign of abuse against her. The thriller, which won Bergman an Oscar for Best Actress, was adapted from a 1938 play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton, an English novelist and playwright who also wrote the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.
The term refers to a very particular and insidious kind of abuse – the kind where a person is deliberately manipulated into questioning their own sanity. “You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.” Seventy-eight years later, the term “ gaslighting” has been used in a published High Court judgement for the first time ever, after a woman’s abusive partner gradually convinced her she had bipolar disorder. You’re not going out of your mind,” a detective tells Ingrid Bergman’s Paula in the climactic moments of the 1944 film Gaslight. Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in ‘Gaslight' (MGM/Kobal/Shutterstock)