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Reads gaslighting as a term, concept, and form of abuse fundamentally tied to the literature and culture of the Victorian British Empire.
Victorian Gaslighting is the first literary-cultural history of gaslighting, a term derived from the haunting neo-Victorian play Gas Light (1938), which tells the story of a sadistic husband who manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind. The collection traces the type of emotional abuse we find in the various stage and screen versions of the play back to its nineteenth-century British roots. Gaslighting emerged during an era when the idea of madness was debated, misused, policed, and medicalized like never before—and when the interlocking institutions of patriarchy, slavery, and imperialism sought to convince women, racialized others, and colonized subjects that their own perceptions were not to be trusted. More than anything, as the volume's wide-ranging analyses of both canonical and little-known Victorian texts demonstrate, gaslighting depends on the power to propagate a false narrative. This study clarifies how gaslighting works, then and now, by taking a deep dive into the distinctly Victorian horror story at the heart of this persistent form of injustice.
"A wonderfully innovative, ambitious, impressive collection. Often the term gaslighting is treated loosely, as if it merely means 'lying.' Victorian Gaslighting resists this over-simplification to offer a powerful paradigm for discussing how aspects of material cultural history—from property law to abolition, from debates about authorship to lighting infrastructure—undermine those who are not in positions of power by insinuating that they are incapable of correctly assessing the dynamics that keep them down. This book will absolutely change the conversation around gaslighting." — Andrea Kaston Tange, author of Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature and the Victorian Middle Classes
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Gaslighting Before Gaslight
Diana Bellonby, Nora Gilbert, and Tara MacDonald
I. The Gaslit Mind and Body
1. "Strange Intonations": The Foreign Accents of Disabling Mind Control in Trilby, Dracula, and the Two Film Versions of Gaslight
Nora Gilbert
2. Spiritual Energies: Gaslighting, Yoga, and Cultures of Healing in Nineteenth-Century India
Narin Hassan
3. Obstetric Gaslighting in Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man
Tara MacDonald
II. Marital and Monetary Manipulations
4. Whose Property Is It Anyway?: Economic Gaslighting in the Victorian Novel
Jill Rappoport
5. Gaslighting, Misogynoir, and the Mixed-Race Heiress in The Woman of Colour and Vanity Fair
Rosetta Young
6. Charles Dickens as Gaslighter: A Tale of Two Catherines
Katherine J. Kim
7. "Lit by a fury and a thought": Resistance to Marital Gaslighting in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Amy Levy's "Xantippe"
Sarah E. Kersh
III. Case Studies in Institutional Gaslighting
8. "The thralldom of gas": Capitalist Gaslighting and the Victorian Coal-Gas Industry
Grace Franklin
9. Structural Scarcity: Women's Economic Writing and Epistemic Gaslighting
Lana L. Dalley
10. "When evidence takes a supernatural character": Religious Gaslighting in Elizabeth Gaskell's "Lois the Witch"
Shalyn Claggett
IV. Rape Culture and Rhetorical Control
11. A Matter of Practicality: Mary Prince and Abolitionist Gaslighting
Doreen Thierauf
12. "Old Ladies, Male and Female": Gaslighting the Reader in Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate
Elizabeth Coggin Womack
13. Gaslighting Vernon Lee: Hysteria, Rape Culture, and the Lesbian Intellectual
Diana Bellonby
List of Contributors
Index