To understand gaslighting, you have to watch Gaslight.
I’ve been saying this, to anyone who would listen, for about a decade now—ever since Gaslighting as Presidential Campaign Strategy first made its way down a golden escalator and declared an audience of a few dozen people to be a crowd of thousands, right to the audience-of-a-few-dozen-people’s face.
You may feel, in the years since the golden escalator, like you’ve become an expert on “gaslighting.” But the only way to really understand the term (hint: it’s not just another word for “lying”) is to sit down and watch the harrowing psychological drama from which it got its name.
There are even four different Gaslights to pick from. My personal favorite is the luminous MGM film version from 1944 starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and a young Angela Lansbury in her scene-stealing first film role. But you could choose instead to watch the earlier, starker film adaptation (also called Gaslight) made by British National Films in 1940, or (if a theater near you happens to be staging a production of it) the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, called Gas Light: A Victorian Thriller in Three Acts during its initial London run but renamed Angel Street when it moved to Broadway in 1941.
Or, at least, I thought those were the only four versions of Gaslight to pick from until a couple of years ago, when I discovered archival traces of a fifth version that had somehow vanished from the historical record. Since then, I’ve been able to form a clearer picture of how the lost version differs from all the others, mainly and most hauntingly in the way it ends.
This is the ending of Gaslight that you didn’t know you needed.
Though, like snowflakes, no two Gaslights are exactly alike, the storyline that remains constant through all of them is this: In Victorian London, a man attempts to steal some rare jewels from an older woman in her townhome, but cannot find the jewels and winds up murdering the woman instead. Years later, the man moves into the same townhome with his new wife, so as to continue his search for the jewels. He soon tires of having to look for them surreptitiously at night, and decides to convince his wife that she’s losing her mind so he can have her institutionalized. The way he does this is by moving around small household objects (a brooch, a pocket-watch, a little picture on the wall), but then telling her that she is the one who must have moved them herself—and that, if she doesn’t remember doing so, it’s further proof of her insanity. The husband is on the verge of having the wife committed when a detective who’s taken an interest in the case arrives on the scene, pieces together the plot, and has the husband arrested for murder.
On one level, then, Gaslight is a story of female victimhood, male villainy, and male paternalism. But it is also a story of female strength and resilience, to an extent that’s often unacknowledged or misrepresented in the legion of “gaslighting”-themed think pieces that have flooded the market over the past decade.
Some of this misrepresentation can clearly be blamed on an essay’s author not having watched Gaslight (or, at least, not having watched it carefully enough). This is most obvious in the relentlessly repeated misdescription of the role that the physical “gas lights” play within the narrative. The gas-powered light fixtures in the home are key to the plot, to be sure: the wife notices the flames of the lights dimming soon after her husband appears to go out of the house each evening—the result, she eventually learns, of his turning up the lights in the attic above her, where he really goes each night to search for the jewels. But what does not transpire, in any stage or screen version of Gaslight, is an exchange wherein the wife asks the husband about the dimming and he responds by telling her that she’s just imagining it; that it’s all in her head; that she is (certifiably) insane.
In truth, the gaslit wife never once brings up the mystery of the lights to her husband, probably because she knows that doing so would only invite further derision and mental abuse. She does, however, bring it up to the detective. Immediately and appreciatively, he praises the “keenness” of her observation, remarking that she “should have been a policeman” herself. The detective understands, in other words, how crucial the wife’s skills of discernment are to solving the mystery and catching a murderer.
The “gas light” of the title has, thus, been misleadingly misunderstood. Instead of serving as yet another example of scheming manipulation on the husband’s part, the dimming of the lights in fact represents a way out of the gaslighting abyss for the wife who—in spite of her husband’s efforts to blur and blight her sense of her surroundings—is sharp-witted and sharp-sighted enough to realize it’s happening.
Viewed from this angle, it is a bit ironic that “gaslighting” is the term that’s come to signify the kind of psychological abuse depicted in the narrative. It would really be more apt to say that someone has been “brooched,” or “pocket-watched,” or “little pictured,” since those are the objects the husband uses to rattle the wife’s mind. Yet, from another angle, the term feels just right, encompassing as it does both the threat of disorientation and self-doubt that can be brought on by nefarious forces and the path to resistance, overcoming, and escape. This is the part of the “gaslighting” origin story that people who haven’t watched Gaslight don’t tend to know about: the part of the story where the gaslit victim pushes back.
We’ve been trained to think of gaslighting as a form of psychological violence that’s almost impossible to resist. Instead, we need to draw more inspiration from the “Gaslight” resolution (in all its different iterations) and the kinds of hope it offers.
Perhaps the most deliciously empowering scene of pushback, though, doesn’t appear in any of the versions of Gaslight that are currently accessible. It appears only in the fifth, lost version that I first became aware of in the summer of 2023 while doing archival research for the book I was co-editing with Diana Bellonby and Tara MacDonald (Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice, which is forthcoming from SUNY Press in March 2026).
I was browsing through the MGM Gaslight production files at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles when an anonymously authored, goldenrod-colored document caught my eye. Dated April 28, 1942, the document appears to have been commissioned by MGM execs who were considering adapting Gaslight for the screen a second time. To get a sense of what had worked best in each of the previously produced versions of the story, they asked to see a breakdown of the differences between “the English play” Gas Light, “the New York play” Angel Street, and the 1940 British “movie version.”
“The most obvious point of difference,” the goldenrod document starts off by summarizing, “is the third act, the act in which the denouement occurs.” More specifically, in both Angel Street and the 1940 film, “the climax belongs to Rough, the hero-detective,” since he is the one “who comes out to rescue Bella [the wife] from physical violence at the hands of Manningham [the husband]” and “exposes Manningham as [a] murderer.” In the original English play, by contrast, the climax “belongs to Bella. She relates the story of the murder to her husband as a dream she has had. Then Rough enters.”
The document’s brief description of the ending of the “original English play” stunned me. This was not the ending of the Gas Light script I knew so well by that point—the one first published by Constable and Company in 1939, which I had always assumed was a relatively faithful transcription of what audiences had seen on the London stage in 1938. The ending of that Gas Light is pretty much the same as the ending of Angel Street and the British film, with Detective Rough serving as both the wife’s “rescuer” and the husband’s “exposer.” An alternate ending where the wife does her own exposing, and her own rescuing? This I had to see!
The only problem was, the version with the alternate ending was nowhere to be found.
Over the next year, my co-editors and I searched fruitlessly for a draft or print copy of the mysteriously missing alternate ending. Then, just when I was about to give up hope, I took one more peek at the MGM production files. This time I found another Gaslight synopsis document, commissioned a few years earlier by an executive named “Mr. Knopf” (presumably Edwin H. Knopf, head of MGM’s scenario department in the late 1930s) and written up by one “Blythe Parsons.” Parsons’s synopsis of Hamilton’s play goes into far more detail than the unsigned 1942 document does, but she is clearly describing the same, vanished version: the one with the ending that “belongs to Bella.”
One of my primary aims in writing this essay is to share this lost Gaslight ending with as many people as possible. To that end, I am quoting in full the section of Parsons’s report that lays out the ending, starting at the point when, in all the other versions, the “hero-detective” steps in to save the day. In the version recapped by Parsons, the salvation works differently:
For a moment he [the husband] forces her [the wife] back into her former mental state, making her think that she has been dreaming. But she suddenly says: “Surely I have not dreamed … if the light is going down…” He pays no attention to this, and she offers to tell him her dream. She is bolder now because the light has told her that the police are in the house. She tells him that she dreamed that she was an old woman and once lived in this house. The furniture then was a little different. The old woman was undressing and putting away her jewels when a tall young man entered. Manningham says: “You interest me Bella. Go on.” She adds: “That man was you. Twenty years ago. You see the mad things I dream. I screamed when I saw you. You cut my throat open with a knife. I lay dead on the floor of this house. But somehow I lived. I lived and watched you all through the night as you ransacked this house, hour after hour, ripping everything up, turning everything out, madly seeking the thing you could not find.” He says: “What’s the game Bella—eh? What’s the game?” She says: “I’m telling you my mad dream, my sane husband.” And she goes on to describe the detective who came to see her. She adds that they found what he could not find. As she speaks the door opens and Rough enters with others of the police. She is showing her husband the brooch he gave her, and the secret compartment which held the Barlow diamonds. She adds that the last thing she saw in her dream was a rope around his neck, but she continues: “I am mad—am I not?” At this moment Rough advances.
In this, my new favorite ending of Gaslight, the wife’s savvy ability to read the room—to correctly interpret what the lights are “telling” her—gives her the courage and resolve to reclaim the perceptual and oratory powers that her husband has so violently wrenched away from her. And the way she does so is by telling the story of another violently wronged woman, from a place of radical (even transcorporeal) solidarity and empathy. Far more than in any of the versions of Hamilton’s play to which we now have access, the wife is, in this lost version, able to combat the false narrative her husband has been foisting upon her with a defiant, rhetorically powerful narrative of her own.
It’s been just over a decade since Gaslighting as Campaign Strategy first made its way down a golden escalator. In that span of time, we’ve experienced Gaslighting as Presidential First Term, Gaslighting as Election Interference, Gaslighting as Legal Defense Strategy, and now, exhaustingly, Gaslighting as Presidential Second Term.
We’ve been told that we’re “crazy” (indeed, suffering from a “Derangement Syndrome”) if we don’t embrace and applaud our administration’s every reckless, unconstitutional whim. We’ve been told that historical facts and scientific data are “fake news.” That systemic injustices and oppressions are “just in our head.” That the women of this country are going to be “protected” … “whether the women like it or not.” That we’re imagining things. Exaggerating things. Focusing on the wrong things.
We’ve also been trained to think of gaslighting as a form of psychological violence that’s almost impossible to resist. And we believe this, in part, because accounts of the term’s origins so often describe the set-up but not the resolution of the Gaslight plot. We need, in this political moment, to draw more inspiration from that resolution (in all its different iterations) and the kinds of hope it offers. More than anything, what we need to take from Gaslight now is the plot-deciding importance of speaking truth to power, of practicing radical solidarity, and of keeping our eyes, always, on the light. 
Featured image: Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944, directed by George Cukor).