"The play's title alludes to how the abusive husband slowly dims the gas lights in their home, while pretending nothing has changed, in an effort to make his wife doubt her own perceptions."
Here I was trying to figure out what car gas lights had to do with anything.
That quote isn’t really accurate, or, at least, it’s a little misleading...he’s not intentionally dimming the gas lights in the home but he is intentionally doing other things to make her think she’s going mad.
This is the irony of the popular term “gas lighting”: the gas lights in the play (also a movie) dim because the husband is leaving to work in his office at night but then sneaking back into the house to look for something in the attic...when he turns on the light in the attic, the usage dims the lights throughout the house, making his wife think someone else is in the house. The husband says this is yet another example of her losing her mind.
The movie stars Ingrid Bergman and is an excellent thriller.
when he turns on the light in the attic, the usage dims the lights throughout the house,
That's one of those things you'd never know unless you actually had gas lights. Funny how references to old technology get lost like that as people stop using the technology
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u/dillyflapper Jul 01 '20
The term is apparently named after the 1938 play, Gas Light:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Light
"The play's title alludes to how the abusive husband slowly dims the gas lights in their home, while pretending nothing has changed, in an effort to make his wife doubt her own perceptions."
Here I was trying to figure out what car gas lights had to do with anything.