Gaslighting: Domestic Noir, the Narratives of Coercive Control

Abstract

‘Gaslighting’ as a term derives from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 melodrama Gas Light, a play in which an older husband sets out to drive his wife to madness. These tropes, the suspiciously charming man, the claustrophobic domestic setting and the terrorized woman, would find new iterations in the first decades of the new millennium which saw the growth of a disturbing new genre described by publishers and booksellers as ‘domestic noir’. In its discussion of crime novels by Emily Barr, Fiona Barton, Sharon Bolton, Elizabeth Haynes, alongside the bestsellers The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl, Philips suggests that the genre of ‘domestic noir’ directly addresses crimes against women, including child abuse, domestic violence, sexual harassment and intimidation. She argues that these novels were charting the psychological abuse of women before coercive control was recognized as a criminal offence, and that what makes the genre a new phenomenon is that their protagonists are allowed to exact an often brutal retribution.

Keywords:

• gaslighting
• coercive control
• domestic violence
• thriller
• crime fiction

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gas Light was filmed twice, once directed by Thorold Dickenson in 1940, starring Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and by George Cukor in 1944, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.

2 Both Gone Girl and The Girl on a Train were made into Hollywood movies, the former directed by David Fincher in 2014, The Girl on a Train by Tate Taylor in 2016

3 There is much evidence that contemporary writers are well aware of this tradition in women's writing, and regularly reference Rebecca, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; an updated version of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Woman Who Ran by Sam Baker was published in 2012.

4 Sleeping with the Enemy, a 1987 novel by Nancy Price was made into a film in 1991 (dir. Joseph Ruben) and is an early forerunner in which a woman is threatened by and escapes a controlling husband.

5 All websites accessed April 2021.

6 The Girl on a Train was written by Paula Hawkins, a journalist who already had a track record of single women novels, under the name of Amy Silver.

7 www.elizabeth-haynes.com

8 This is a fantasy that the protagonist of the later novel Apple Tree Yard (Doughty 2013) acts upon.

9 Sharon Bolton’s first novels were published under the gender-neutral name S. J. Bolton.