This thesis examines portrayals of gaslighting toward women in American film. Gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that frequently targets women, has a long history in cinema, and narratives that foreground the practice have developed a series of narrative and stylistic conventions. These conventions frequently simplify the realities of psychological abuse toward women, representing gaslighting and its perpetrators with ideologically patriarchal undertones. Such undertones have changed over time, often in ways that reflect cultural and political shifts within American society. Gaslight films’ female protagonists have demonstrated more agency, while the perpetrators have grown steadily more monstrous as the subgenre shifted from a melodramatic to horrific mode. Using a genre studies approach to survey these constantly evolving tropes across three eras, I argue that the gaslight film is a subgenre that reflects growing attitudes toward and awareness of gender roles and psychological abuse towards women. Concerns involving representations of female agency and the ability of genres to concisely communicate hegemonic, patriarchal ideologies lie beneath this analysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42873 |
| Date | 11 August 2021 |
| Creators | Alston, Dana William |
| Contributors | Decker, Lindsey, Grundmann, Roy |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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