Last month, the clever programmers at Turner Classic Movies chose to screen the movie Gaslight at the same time that the news networks were carrying the State of the Union address from Washington. It was a masterclass in trolling, subtle but obvious, not unlike how Queen Elizabeth used to express her private feelings by the jewellery she chose to wear at certain events, such as the time she wore a gift from the Obamas when she was obliged to entertain Donald Trump.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Gaslight, it was a 1944 film starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, along with Angela Lansbury, about a young woman, Paula, played by Bergman, whose husband, Gregory, endeavours to drive her insane by slowly manipulating her into believing she is insane in order to distract her from his own criminality. At strategic points in the film, Paula notices the gaslights dimming inexplicably. Like many Hollywood productions, Gaslight is based on an earlier British movie, which, in turn, was based on a London stage play. It won two academy awards, out of seven nominations, and, ironically enough, during the first Trump administration, it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in the U.S. National Film Registry for being “culturally and historically significant.”
The primary reason for its significance, beyond chilling its viewers to the bone, is that it’s the source of the expression “gaslighting,” which has become one of the essential words in recent years, long after the film first appeared on the silver screen. Gaslighting is defined by Merriam-Webster, which named gaslighting its Word of the Year in 2022, as the “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.” That’s gaslighting in a nutshell, and we’ve all experienced it – some more than others.
The term might never have been so commonly used if it had continued to refer primarily to the psychological manipulation of individuals in domestic relationships, but during the last decade, its use has been extended to describe the psychological manipulation of large numbers of people by politicians and the media, a phenomenon that runs deeper and extends further than simple propaganda. Today, we speak of gaslighting all the time in this “post-truth” age of “alternative facts.” What we used to quaintly call “public relations” and “messaging,” evolved into “spin,” and has long since descended into gaslighting.
Gaslighting as a phenomenon was around long before we had a word to describe it, long before we had the fields of psychology and psychiatry. It may be older than human language itself, deeply grounded in the ways in which human beings have influenced and manipulated one another.
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| Elizabeth P.W. Packard (1816-1897) |
In the asylum, instead of seeking to treat her alleged insanity, the staff seemed more intent on convincing her she was insane. And, in a classic injustice that appears when people are accused of denialism, a concept we should employ more sparingly than we do, Elizabeth’s denial that she was insane was itself taken as evidence of her insanity. The louder she protested, the crazier she was seen to be, so circular was the reasoning.
Although it was her religious views that were presented as evidence of insanity, the immediate cause of her institutionalization was Elizabeth’s refusal to sign a deed to dispose of some real estate without receiving consideration to compensate her for her lost property. Follow the money. Always follow the money. This is why I consider her case to be one of gaslighting – her religious views were employed as a justification to commit her to an asylum, where her resentment of her husband was then added as further evidence, but its proximate cause was her refusal to allow her husband to ignore what she considered to the right to her own property. However, he told her and her father that he was committing her so that her “reputation for being an insane person might destroy the influence of [her] religious opinions” … and presumably free him to liquidate family assets.
After three years, in 1863, she was released from the asylum, having been declared “incurable,” perhaps because she wasn’t actually ill, and her husband then imprisoned her in a room at home, where the door was locked and the window nailed shut. Somehow, she managed to get a note to a sympathetic neighbour, Sarah Haslett, who took the letter to Judge Charles Starr, who issued a writ of habeas corpus. Theophilus was summoned to bring Elizabeth to the judge’s chambers, and, after he met with them, the judge ordered a jury trial to determine whether or not Elizabeth was insane.
The trial itself was something of a spectacle, lasting five days, and Theophilus’s lawyers presented evidence that she held unorthodox religious views, argued with her husband, and even sought to leave his congregation. Can you imagine it? The scandal of it all!
One of these witnesses, Dr. J.W. Brown, who helped have Elizabeth committed, explained why he had concluded Elizabeth Packard was insane. At the end of his testimony, Dr. Brown summarized in 15 points his reasons for finding her insane, repeating himself with two of the points, and closing with: “Her viewing the subject of religion from the osteric standpoint of Christian exegetical analysis, and agglutinating the polsynthetical ectoblasts of homogeneous asceticism.”
Let me repeat that statement in case you missed the finer points of it: “Her viewing the subject of religion from the osteric standpoint of Christian exegetical analysis, and agglutinating the polsynthetical ectoblasts of homogeneous asceticism.”
It is reported that: “The witness left the stand amidst roars of laughter; and it required some moments to restore order in the courtroom.” While this wasn’t exactly the Scopes trial, Dr. Brown looked every bit as foolish as William Jennings Bryan did three generations later. The people in the courtroom clearly concluded that the doctor was something of a clown.
Do any of you have the foggiest idea of what Dr. Brown meant? Let me assure that I have not begun speaking in tongues. I was as confused as all of you, and so, desperate to understand what this theological jargon deployed as psychobabble meant, I turned to artificial intelligence, which, in addition to correctly linking the phrase to Elizabeth Packard’s trial, explained that, in everyday English, Dr. Brown was referring to Elizabeth’s “shift toward subjective, internal interpretation of Christianity rather than accepting traditional, dogmatic doctrines imposed by her husband and church.” Huh. Does that make a little more sense? It sounds like what religious liberals have been doing for generations. This is us.
At the conclusion of the trial, the jury deliberated for only seven minutes before returning its verdict that Elizabeth Packard was sane. Having been legally kidnapped, she was at last legally redeemed. Almost. By the time she returned home, Theophilus had sold their furniture, confiscated her wardrobe, and rented their house to someone else. And thus began her legal battle to recover her property and custody of her six children, and her political battle to reform the laws governing married women and all people who were considered unfit to manage their own affairs.
But what are we to make of her “Christian exegetical analysis, and agglutinating the polsynthetical ectoblasts of homogeneous asceticism?” Why did Theophilus, a man who moved his family from Massachusetts to Illinois with the express desire of escaping the liberalizing currents then gaining ascendancy in New England, including Unitarianism, find her religious views so threatening?
Well, she had come under the influence of Swedenborgianism and Universalism, both of which were gaining popularity at the time. Swedenborgianism, better known in North America as the Church of the New Jerusalem, took its inspiration of the teachings of 18th-century Swedish mystic Emanual Swedenborg, who also had a influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and other New England Transcendentalists. And Universalism? Well, that was the faith of some of our own spiritual ancestors.
Elizabeth denied the Calvinist doctrine of human depravity. “That terrible dogma that our natures are depraved, has ruined its advocates, and led astray many a guileless, confiding soul,” she declared. “Why can we not accept of God’s well done work as perfect, and instead of defiling, perverting it, let it stand in all its holy proportions, filling the place God designed it to occupy, and adorn the temple it was fitted for? I for one … am determined to be a woman, true to my nature. I regard my nature as holy, and every deviation from its instinctive tendency I regard as a perversion – a sin. To live a natural, holy life, … I regard as my highest honor, my chief glory.”
Likewise, Elizabeth had come to believe in universal salvation – that the same fate awaited us all. “I am not now afraid of being called insane if I avow my belief that Christ died for all mankind,” she insisted, “… that no rebellious child of God’s great family will ever transcend his ability to discipline into entire willing obedience to his will. Can I ever believe that God loves his children less than I do mine? … And has God less power to execute his kind plans than I have?”
Now, I need to say that Elizabeth Packard was hardly a liberal as we would understand it today. She was simply a sincere and inquiring Christian who disputed some of Calvinism’s central tenets while embracing unconventional ideas that Calvinists found uncomfortable, even threatening. Even by the standards of her own time, her opinions were hardly radical, and most were thoroughly conventional. For instance, she viewed the union of marriage as a partnership, but she accepted the idea that a wife was the junior partner; she simply insisted that what she saw as her natural rights as a woman be respected by her husband and the state.
Still, although her overall religious perspective was quite conventional, she insisted that she was entitled to her own views. “Yes, I insist upon it,” she declared, “that it is my own individual right to superintend my own thoughts; and I say farther, it is not my right to superintend the thoughts or conscience of any other developed being. … My individuality has been naturally developed by a life of practical godliness, so that I now know what I do believe, as is not the case with that class in society who dare not individualize themselves.”
“I have become so radical,” she continued, “as to call in question every opinion of my educated belief, which conflicts with the dictates of reason and commonsense. … Henceforth, I am determined to use my own reason and conscience in my investigation of truth, and in the establishment of my own opinions and practice I shall give my own reason and conscience the preference to all others.”
From 1863 until her death in 1897, at the age of 80, Elizabeth devoted herself to fighting for the rights of women – especially married women – and challenging the power on insane asylums,” writing several books and campaigning across the states. “Married woman needs legal emancipation from married servitude, as much as the slave needed legal emancipation from his servitude.” Curiously enough, although she and Theophilus neither reconciled nor divorced, she supported him when he became destitute – until his dying day.
“Cannot there be laws enacted by which a married woman can stand on the same platform as a married man, that is, have an equal right, at least, to the protection of her inalienable rights?” she asked. “And is not this our petition for protection founded in justice and humanity?”
Like Paula in the movie Gaslight, Elizabeth Packard prevailed and prospered, but gaslighting continues in the households and institutions of the modern world. It continues to be used a weapon that some deploy to manipulate others to their own purposes. In the 19th and 20th centuries, and for long before, women were its primary victims, and, if the Epstein files have taught us anything, women continue to be victimized by it.
But every one of us is vulnerable to gaslighting – by family and friends, intimate partners and strangers alike – and it can happen anywhere – in our homes or online, in politics or the media. Whenever someone tries to convince us we are crazy because of our religious or political views, because of who we love or rebuff, because of what we do or avoid, we are vulnerable to gaslighting. We need to remain vigilant, and, when it happens, like Elizabeth Packard, remain resolute and determined, confident in our own ability to discern what is true and act upon what is good, using our own reason and conscience.
So let us go forward, today and always, in pursuit of our unique “osteric standpoint of … exegetical analysis, and agglutinating the polsynthetical ectoblasts of homogeneous asceticism.”
A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg on International Women's Day.
Works Consulted
Phyllis Doyle Burns, "Elizabeth Ware Packard: Advocate for Women and the Mentally Ill," HubPages (November 2023).
E.P.W. Packard, Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard's Trial and Self-Defence from the Charge of Insanety (Chicago: Clarke & Co., Publishers, 1870).
E.P.W. Packard, Modern Persecution, or Married Women's Liabilities (Hartford, CT, 1874).
Troy Rondinone, PhD, "It's About Control: Remembering a Mental Health Crusader," Psychology Today (July 2022).
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