31 Days of Feminist Horror Films: GASLIGHT
Ghouls, ghosts, and goblins are plenty frightening, but in 1944’s American adaptation of GASLIGHT, the biggest fear of all comes in the form of a psychologically abusive husband. For women, there are few terrors as intense as a controlling, sadistic partner from whom you cannot escape — supernatural scares are no match for the daily horror of living with someone who destroys your sense of self so fully with control tactics that you begin to lose a grip on reality and question your own sanity. The idea of “gaslighting” has gained cultural ubiquity in the last few years, as it’s become a common tactic of certain…political figures to make the masses question their own memories, and GASLIGHT (based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play) is the origin of the term, which is now widely used in psychiatric practice. Anchored by Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar-winning performance, GASLIGHT’s narrative power has not been at all diminished in the seventy years since its release.
We enter the world of GASLIGHT with a close-up of yellow wallpaper and a lantern serving as the backdrop for the credits, alluding to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist tale of madness brought upon by controlling husband. Already motherless, Paula (Bergman) is orphaned as a child when her world-famous opera singing aunt Alice is brutally murdered in front of her by a burglar in search of jewels. So, she spends her childhood being molded into an opera singer just like her beloved aunt, and when a suitor, Gregory (Charles Boyer) comes calling, Paula ignores red flags like the intensity of Gregory’s feelings for her, his insistence that they marry after just two weeks together, and the idea that he wants to take her away from the life she’s been building to move back into her aunt’s home in London where she knows no one. It’s all classic abuser behavior that seeks to totally isolate Paula from anyone who could tell her that this man is unsafe.
They begin sleeping together soon after, and despite warnings from an older woman on a train ride who tells Paula the story of “Bluebeard,” she finds herself with her new husband in London, revisiting the old ghosts of Alice’s home. While settling in, Paula finds a mysterious letter that sends Gregory into a temporary rage, though he quickly pulls back — once Alice’s belongings are safely tucked into the attic, he seems secure that his new bride will be able to put aside her past and join him in newly wedded bliss.
But Paula knows something is amiss: the ghostly interiors of Alice’s home make Paula appear as a spectre revisiting a violent past she’s never fully processed, and she complains that the home “smells of death,” lamenting the “flowers and light” that filled the home in her youth. And soon enough, Gregory’s psychological torment of Paula begins — pictures disappear from the walls, footsteps echo through the attic, Paula loses a brooch Gregory gave her, and of course, the gas lamps flicker without reason. Paula begins to question her own sanity, but with Gregory’s insistence that it’s all her doing, she can’t do much to protest — she can’t upset her new husband, the one chance at real happiness she’s ever had.
And, Gregory’s been doing his part to make himself the sun in Paula’s life: as their maid notes, “master says she isn’t ready to see people,” explaining how Gregory has not only kept Paula from leaving their home, but isn’t allowed to receive visitors either. She has only his word and his moods to keep in mind — Paula begins modulating her behavior as to not upset her husband, in spite of her own happiness and health. Within the four walls that recall so much trauma from her childhood, Paula’s appearance becomes ghastly — pale and disheveled even in fancy nightgowns, she floats around the home, careful not to upset Gregory in any way (and therefore, not doing very much at all that isn’t expressly suggested by him) especially since his cruelty towards her has intensified.
Gregory escalates his psychological control of Paula by hiring a young maid, Nancy, an Oscar-nominated Angela Lansbury in her screen debut. Gregory flirts with her shamelessly, instructing Nancy to act as he does towards Paula, and then telling Paula she’s the one being unfair. It’s a particularly heartless move from Gregory, one that makes Nancy an at least somewhat unwilling participant in his spousal abuse, and pushes Paula to the brink. Gregory tantalizes Paula with the proposition of a night out at a society party though he keeps suggesting that her nerves might not be up to it, but Paula prepares anyway, only to be absolutely humiliated by Gregory who plays another one of his missing object pranks on her, causing Paula to have a public outburst in front of a respectable crowd.
Paula begins to believe that perhaps her husband is right, and she doesn’t have her wits about her. How else could she explain the gaps in what she knows to be true and what her husband, her supposed protector and confidante, tells her to be true? Gregory instead takes sadistic pleasure in watching his wife convince herself she is doing something wrong, and begins teasing her with tales of her mother’s supposed madness, telling Paula that he’ll institutionalize her — a pervasive form of male control over women in the first half of the twentieth century — if she doesn’t shape up.
Paula’s outburst comes at the precise right time: it’s noticed by Brian (Joseph Cotten) a Scotland Yard detective who’s intrigued by Paula because she so resembles her aunt who he loved as a boy, but also because he notes Gregory’s bizarre behavior at the party. Brian begins looking into the case of the missing jewels further, eventually deducing that Gregory has been rummaging through Alice’s belongings in the attic, explaining the gaslamp flickering and footsteps Paula’s been supposedly imagining. While Brian’s interest in Paula may come from an attraction first to her aunt, then to her, he treats her only with empathy and professional courtesy — he’s the only character to do so in some time, and Paula clings to his kindness like a life raft. These kinds of male ally characters are often present in suspense pictures from Hollywood’s Golden Age, and Brian is an especially shining example of a noble man who refuses to let Paula be tortured any longer. Bergman is magnificent in the scene where Brian finally confirms to Paula that everything she’s been struggling with is indeed real, and that her sanity is sound.
With no support from the house’s staff, Paula’s been left totally alone with her growing madness, just like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and all it takes is one outside party to assure her that she’s not mad for Paula to come back around and recognize the extent of Gregory’s long con of her. Gregory is of course the man who murdered her aunt, and he’s courted, seduced, married, and made Paula mad all in attempt to get the jewels he sought so many years earlier. In a bit of bitter irony, Gregory does find the jewels, hidden in plain sight alongside paste jewelry, just as Brian closes in on him and he’s arrested. In what was undoubtedly her “Oscar clip” before such a thing existed, Bergman’s Paula does finally get her revenge on Gregory — before he’s taken in, he’s tied to a chair, and Paula, the fury of a thousand sleepless nights coursing through her, turns the tables on him.
With a kitchen knife in hand, Paula becomes the torturer, forcing Gregory to answer for every horror he’s put her through, the gas lamps reflecting in the knife as he does. Paula brings herself to the edge of stabbing him, taking back the knife as a reclamation of the domestic power he’s stolen from her, but knows that that power is more freeing than any bloodletting could ever be — she’s survived the folk tale fate of a beautiful young woman being driven mad by her husband, and lived to tell the tale without losing her mind in the process. “Watching you go brings glory to my heart,” she tells Gregory in one of the finest lines ever given to an abused woman who’s refound her strength. And we close again with the yellow wallpaper, except Paula’s been lucky enough to escape as a woman trapped within four walls.
As current events tell us time and time again, stoic male malice often festers to become ultimate horror on a personal, professional, or global scale — when men are allowed to abuse without recourse, their power only grows until they act out in increasingly horrific ways. Even in an age of women’s empowerment and within the context of an emerging new wave of feminism, many women still suffer domestic abuse silently, and the options were only more and more dire as we go back in time: for many wives, there was simply no escape from an abusive partner besides their death or your own.
GASLIGHT provides an empathetic portrayal of what living in the terror of domestic abuse looks like every day, and demonstrates that while there may be no physical or sexual abuse happening in Paula and Gregory’s marriage, the psychological and emotional abuse Paula survives every day as every bit as insidious as physical violence. The terror of having a partner who’s not only psychologically abusing you, but then forcing you to turn that abuse inward as you question your own reality is brought to life by Bergman’s stellar lead performance, which allows us to really understand Paula’s psychological gymnastics as she struggles to maintain any shred of normalcy. It’s a particularly sensitive portrayal of a domestic violence victim for the time, and while it’s not quite a “women’s picture,” Paula’s victory over Gregory does feel absolutely triumphant.
“Gaslighting” has become such a common (and essential) term in discussing psychological abuses, and this film shows that through the power of narrative, we can come to gain a greater understanding of social issues like abusive relationships. GASLIGHT succeeds in demonstrating this to its audience because we’re so fully grounded in Paula’s character — her worries are our worries, her fear are our fears, and her victory is our victory. GASLIGHT may be more of a suspense picture than a horror film, but with a heroine like Paula, it explores the horror of domestic violence from a totally real point of view, one that’s far too relatable for many women.
