“The word materializes something that seems highly invisible,” Conner told me. The word gaslight, then, becomes an essential weapon in fighting back. What these phrases have in common is they undermine a person’s instinctive emotional responses-an evolutionary warning of danger that’s just as real as a physiological response-by hijacking the space where these abstract emotional responses take form: language. Conner’s research has identified common phrases that indicate gaslighting, including You’re overreacting, You’re being too sensitive, and I’m sorry you feel that way. Language is ultimately a process by which we, as a community of human beings, co-construct our collective reality. Her working definition? “A form of conscious or subconscious psychological manipulation mediated through language or by the actions of a speaker with a perceived higher status that has the effect of invalidating or denying the interlocutors’ reality or lived experience in an interaction or interactions, with the impact of discrediting them within a micro or macro context.” A bit wordy, but quite thorough-Conner’s definition cuts to the core of the phenomenon, which uses language as a weapon in an epistemological war. Conner has studied the process of gaslighting: what it means, how it works, and how to identify it on a linguistic level. Tracy Conner, a sociolinguistics professor at Northwestern whose research focuses on the connection between language and justice, calls the word “a long overdue tool” for social awareness. Then, after falling out of common usage for 50 or so years, gaslight returned to the lexicon with gusto in the age of #MeToo and misinformation. Wallace, who wrote: “It is also popularly believed to be possible to ‘gaslight’ a perfectly healthy person into psychosis by interpreting his own behavior to him as symptomatic of serious mental illness.” By the middle of the century, the title of the story had become verbal shorthand for its central narrative action. He also found a 1962 essay by Canadian anthropologist Anthony F. According to a 1948 Miami News article about divorce proceedings, the plaintiff claimed that her husband “gave her the Gaslight treatment.” Research by the linguist Ben Zimmer uncovered casual usage of the term in a sitcom in 1952, and again in 1962. The central conceit of the story touched a nerve-and the title of the story came to mean something outside the confines of the theater. Thus goes the plot of the 1938 hit play Gas Light, adapted into numerous forms, including a radio play called Angel Street, an American play, and, most famously, a 1944 Best Picture–nominated movie starring Ingrid Bergman. She realizes she’s not crazy he’s messing with her. She realizes that he must be pretending to leave, but actually just going upstairs (and turning the lights on). Soon after her husband leaves, she hears footsteps from the locked upper floors, and the gas lights in the room she’s in flicker and dim. Not a bad plan for a conniving, murderous sociopath! He begins by leaving the house for long periods of time without telling her where he’s going.īut the wife has an ally in the home itself: the sconce-light wall fixtures in the building use a common reserve of gas. So he begins to play tricks on her to make her feel crazy, hoping to have her institutionalized, which would give him her power of attorney. As you can probably imagine, Victorian culture isn’t too kind to women-socially, legally, or emotionally. In Victorian London, a husband wants to get rid of his wife so that he can take the valuable jewels she’s inherited from her late aunt without drawing attention to himself.
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