Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice
Diana Bellonby, Nora Gilbert, and Tara MacDonald
Victorian Gaslighting is the first literary-cultural history of gaslighting, a term derived from the haunting neo-Victorian play Gas Light (1938) that 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.
Out this month from SUNY Press as part of its “Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century” series (ed. Pamela Gilbert), the hardcover version can be purchased here throughout March at a 30% discount by using the code SWHM26 (in honor of Women’s History Month), and a more affordable paperback version will be out in September.
Diana Bellonby is a Philadelphia-based writer who holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. In 2014, she cofounded The Fringe Foundation for Social Justice and devoted ten years to codirecting its grantmaking operations while continuing her scholarship on Victorian literature, visual culture, and histories of gender and sexuality. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Books, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture, and New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions. She is currently working on a memoir that interweaves her own story of sexual trauma with a literary history of rape culture.
Nora Gilbert is Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas, where she co-specializes in Victorian literature and early Hollywood film. She is the author of Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (Stanford University Press, 2013); Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023); and articles and book chapters that have appeared in such venues as PMLA, Screen, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Film & History, Victorian Review, Avidly, and Public Books. She has served as the editor of the journal Studies in the Novel since 2017.
Tara MacDonald is Professor of English and Women’s & Gender studies and the Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and The New Man, Masculinity, and Marriage in the Victorian Novel (Routledge, 2015), as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century literature, gender, and feminism. She recently coedited a special issue of Studies in the Novel entitled “Strange Temporalities: Gender, Time, and the Novel” and she is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Sensation Fiction.
