The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse and manipulation in which the abuser deliberately denies their target’s reality, making them doubt their own memory, experiences, and judgment. The concept and term originated with the 1944 movie, Gaslight, in which a husband makes subtle modifications to his wife’s environment—like dimming their gas lights—then claims that nothing has changed. He does this to make her feel as though she is losing her mental stability. By convincing her that her perception of the world cannot be trusted, he asserts an unhealthy degree of control over her life. Likewise, Maggie’s ex-husband Colin habitually gaslit her during their marriage in order to deflect her suspicions about his infidelity. His tactics made her feel untrustworthy, paranoid, and incompetent; as her insecurities throughout the novel show, the effects of Colin’s abuse continue to plague Maggie even a year after the revelation of his betrayal. Only with Ethan’s support and her own successful investigation into Eleanor’s disappearance does she finally regain confidence in her own perceptions and judgment.

However, consciously acknowledging the toxicity of Colin’s tactics does not prevent them from causing emotional damage, and Maggie continues internalizing these old criticisms in new ways. A prime example occurs when Maggie thinks of herself as “silly” or “foolish” when she considers moving her dresser to block her door after Eleanor disappears. She often thinks accuses herself of being “paranoid” because Colin always made her feel “a little bit crazy” (171) by claiming that she was overreacting, misinterpreting, or being unreasonable. Even now, Maggie thinks that if she hadn’t walked in on Colin and Emily having sex, she “might still be telling herself that it was all in her head” (171). The shadow of this power differential continues to disturb her, as when she speculates that if she had lived a century ago, Colin could have used his false claims to rob her of her liberty and have her committed to a mental health institution. By inserting such contemplations into the narrative, the author stresses the deeply damaging nature of gaslighting and highlights its historical patterns, drawing attention to the harmful patriarchal patterns that still exist in society.

Gaslighting is widely acknowledged as an effective strategy because the targets come to see themselves as flawed, prone to error, and even damaged. Thanks to Colin’s gaslighting, Maggie believes that “even the people who were legally obligated to love [her] shrugged and said maybe not. She […] was alone and afraid and nothing. She was nothing” (99). The bleak, defeated tone of this passage emphasizes how worthless Colin’s abuse makes her feel, even after she learns the extent to which he was willing to deceive her. Even more illustrative are the reactions of those like Eleanor and Ethan, who care about Maggie, every time that Maggie “pull[s] herself back, taking up less space and making herself a smaller target” (160). Even when Maggie sleeps, Ethan notices that she curls up in a ball, as if “she wanted to take up as little space as possible, like she wasn’t even entitled to half of her own bed” (142). These subtler behavioral patterns emphasize the visceral level of damage that Colin’s manipulations have caused, for now, even a year after her divorce, Maggie continues to carry her insecurities into other relationship dynamics. Her trauma-based quirks show that targets of emotional abuse often believe the messages they get from their abuser and have difficulty in shedding these internalized attitudes even after the abuse has ended.

Only after Maggie and Ethan uncover the truth about Eleanor and her 100th novel does Maggie begin to see parallels between Colin’s abuse and the way in which the guests have tried to gaslight Eleanor. When she observes these toxic patterns aimed at the smartest, cleverest, and most thorough thinker she knows, she realizes that the same thing has been done to her. When she addresses the household at the end of the novel, she suddenly realizes that she “wasn’t talking about Eleanor anymore,” and she says, “You know, if mankind has one universal superpower, it’s gaslighting women into thinking they’re the problem” (262). Without the experience of witnessing another woman becoming the target of gaslighting, Maggie might never have been able to move past the trauma of Colin’s similar abuse.