Gaslighting

Good books are full of gemstones native to the major storyline, but sometimes the gemstone appears almost peripherally and as a complete surprise. It is adjacent to the main narrative.

Such is the case with Laura Beers’ “Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century.” Beers is a Professor of British History at American University, and the book is about the life of one of Britain’s most formidable authors, George Orwell. He is best known for his classic dystopian novels “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-four.”

For Orwell followers, Beers’ title of forewarning about the contemporary political scene based on Orwell’s writings is no surprise, but it is not the subject of today’s essay. Rather, the surprise gemstone is the telling of the origin of the word “gaslighting,” which is in such common use in today’s press, the full political spectrum of it.

Entrance of the term “gaslighting” into general use, Beers notes, began in the 1960s, and is, as she puts it, “ubiquitous” today. It is, however, such an odd word to be tossing around, puzzling in the context of what is the literal and original noun meaning of a gaslight: an incandescent lamp fueled by gas, and likely visualized by many people today as a feature of a horse-drawn carriage of period movies on TV, perhaps even ones in black and white.

Gaslighting, the noun of more modern vintage, is manipulation of a person using psychologically devious methods so to as question his/her own sanity or ability to reason effectively. The gemstone is to learn now that the usage in this way comes from the 1938 play “Gas Light” by British playwright Patrick Hamilton. It was subsequently, in 1940 and 1944, remade into two films, the first British, the second Hollywood, all during the lifetime of Orwell. So, he likely knew the usage this way.

“The central conceit of the play and the films is that the husband wants to drive his wife to a breakdown by convincing her that she is crazy in order to get his hands on extraordinary jewels. One way he does this is to deny that the gaslights in their home are dimming, even though he orchestrates that action.” So, it is not surprising that the term, understood in this way, began as a single word designating one manifest of an abusive marital relationship.

Just the etymology of one word, one that now is cast about so casually as part of discourse, is revelation indeed, at least to me. A surprise gemstone in one book. If ever the case need be made for reading books, books and not just newspapers and social media flashes of information, this is it. It pleases me no end to now know the origin of “gaslighting.”

I will forever hear it spoken in a brand-new way, a link between horse-drawn carriages and ill lit homes of another century in film, on the one hand, and modern day news reporting. Voila!