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Gaslight and the Shock Politics Two-Step

a kind of hurricane in the mind

—NAOMI KLEIN

What happens when we think of shock not just in connection with disaster capitalism but also with disaster patriarchy?

Shock politics means those empowered by the current political moment work to deprive the public of fixed or stable points of orientation and then flood the public’s senses with stimuli such that we are overwhelmed, desensitized, and disoriented, left nearly incapable of response or action because we are confused, exhausted, or fatigued, rather like the U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba who were made ill by some mysterious, silent assault on the senses. Shock calls attention to this specifically sensorial precarity. For the last two-and-a-half decades, scholars studied precarity as an effect of working conditions and material inequality. Both precarities are disorienting, but the sensorial one has impacts that are heightened by disinformation, bot, and corporate mediation, and it not only exploits labor ever more fully but also deactivates citizenship ever more completely.

The combination of disorientation and desensitization that I call the shock politics two-step is a two-part assault on the senses, consisting in sensory deprivation followed by sensory saturation. Together these cause disorientation, disaffection, and alienation, civic fatigue, and, often, surrender. The two-step is in play throughout Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, where the targets of shock are whole countries, states, or cities that have just experienced a disaster, natural or manmade, like a tsunami (Thailand), flood (New Orleans), military coup (Chile), or, since the publication of The Shock Doctrine, a new coronavirus (New York, then Florida, then Texas …).¹ Such disasters, which disorient most people on the ground, look like an opportunity to “disaster capitalists” who come in to rebuild and resegregate, by race or class, in pursuit of a locally unpopular but profitable neoliberal agenda of privatization and gentrification that destroys local infrastructures, loots domestic economies, and is often secured, in the face of resistance, by military power and the use of torture. In the words of Thai survivors of the 2004 Asian tsunami, to “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now” not the homes of bereft locals needing to rebuild, but “open land.”² This is what Klein calls the tabula rasa strategy. It wipes clean the slate of land and history and deprives communities of shared points of orientation. Klein connects it to the use of electroshock therapy earlier in the twentieth century, specifically to U.S.-funded research by Ewen Cameron at McGill University, which used shock to wipe clean the slate of patients’ minds.³ The hope then was that their personalities could be depatterned, and this would rid them of undesirable habits, leaving a tabula rasa on which to inscribe good ones instead, through repetition and training.⁴ In many cases, the result of these shock therapy experiments was lifelong suffering. Suffering follows the political use of shock, too.

The shock two-step recurs in all of Klein’s examples. In the wake of disaster, blackouts and severed communications cause sensory deprivation.⁵ Then sensory saturation is inflicted. This can be achieved via constant barrages of disinformation, what Steve Bannon calls “flooding the zone” (and of course floods are one of the natural disasters that make the shock two-step possible).⁶ The same pattern characterizes the torture used in support of shock, as in the case, for example, of the U.S. in Iraq: first, deprivation—detainees hooded for days without access to light—and then, saturation—detainees, unhooded and subjected to nonstop bright lighting in their cells, again for days.⁷

What The Shock Doctrine does not mention is how shock is also characteristic of what has come to be called gaslighting. First, the woman being terrorized is isolated, deprived of normal social stimuli, public things, and activities, and of the company of others whose senses can confirm her experiences of hers. Then, disoriented, she is saturated by a flood of misinformation and false cues, until she comes to doubt her own mind and abilities. This shock two-step of deprivation and saturation is familiar to feminists who study the (in) delicacies of patriarchal degradation and to those who study the details of domination in the context of U.S. white supremacy. Denying the existence of structural misogyny and racism (Americans all have equal opportunity!) puts those who suffer from them in the position of trying to articulate experiences for which there are no words, because they are not allowed. Hence the creative response of the gaslit by way of terms like “double consciousness,” “the veil,” white “dreamers,” and “consciousness raising.” All try to give voice to experiences officially denied.

Hence too feminists’ quick recognition of the shock tactics used by Trump, as for example when, six months into his term, in a meeting with military and political advisors, he said, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people” and “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”⁸ The use of humiliation, infantilization, and feminization to dominate is a common feature of domestic abuse. In paranoid gothic films like Gaslight, as in female gothic novels, the scene where the husband suddenly insults his new bride is the tip-off that the marriage will not be as expected.

George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), a paranoid gothic film with a noir aesthetic, depicts the household variety of shock and assigns responsibility for it to a single villain: the foreign, somewhat sexually ambiguous, and, finally, feminized Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) who isolates his bride, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), and ruptures her connections with the larger social world in the hope of stealing her hidden treasure.⁹ Made during WWII, Gaslight, set in England and (briefly) Italy, tells the story of how Paula is driven nearly mad by her husband, until a stranger intervenes on her behalf. Gaslight illustrates the vulnerability of the isolated individual to the machinations of the powerful. Anton begins by never leaving Paula alone. When he proposes marriage and she says she needs time to think about it, he feigns acceptance but secretly contrives to meet her train at her resort destination. Surprising her, he claims he just couldn’t wait, and she yields to him, mistaking his attentions for true love. They marry immediately. This is his pattern: to deprive her of the kind of solitude that thinking requires and of the plurality without which perspective soon wilts. The love that allows for no time alone will soon become the loveless isolation of being alone all the time.

It is worth noting the comparison to Trump. He does not take a train to block our quest for solitude, but his constant tweeting has the same effect: it diminishes the space of refuge and shuts out the time of reflection. We are rarely alone with our own minds, always pressed into his company. While others see the constant tweeting as an expression of the man’s narcissistic need to always be in the spotlight (which it may well be), Gaslight helps us see how it works as a device of disorientation, blocking access to the solitude and plurality that are the conditions of critical thinking and reflection.

Once Gregory and Paula are married, they move at his request to her childhood home in London. He does not share the real reason for the move: his interest is in some long-lost jewels he thinks are hidden there. In London, Gregory is able to gather a whole household to his purpose, an old trusted housekeeper and a new untrustworthy maid, and this helps him isolate Paula from friends and neighbors. He determinedly undermines Paula’s faith in her own senses, claiming she has lost or stolen things he has moved or hidden. Gregory wants to distract her from his criminal activities. (Sound familiar? It should: the husband is a certain president and the country is the wife.) Gregory lies about little things to confuse Paula, flirts with the maid in Paula’s presence to demean her, and isolates Paula from society. (American isolationism takes on a new meaning in this context. It is a way to insulate the American public from rival opinions and plural points of view.) Paula is a capable but traumatized person: years earlier, as an orphaned child living with her aunt, she stumbled on the scene of her aunt’s murder. She is vulnerable to Gregory’s machinations and is soon lost, doubting what she knows and blindly looking for a way to make sense of what is happening around her.

Isolated in the house, Paula becomes almost a recluse. Recall how the female gothic novel Jane Eyre begins with the line “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” The reason is the rainy weather; but the confinement caused by the rain is a symbol of sorts for the movement-limiting strictures that Jane must break out of if she is to be a free and independent woman. In Gaslight, Paula is confined, too, but the weather is fine. Nonetheless, she cannot go out for a walk. She dresses, starts toward the door, even crosses the threshold to a gorgeous sunny day, but then the compromised maid asks: is the lady sure she wants to go out, and what should she tell the master if he asks? And Paula hesitates, then goes inside, reeled right back in by the uncertain weather of a man’s mood.¹⁰

In the end, after a long intensifying period of confusion and terror, Paula finds a way out. She has lasted as long as she has, still sane but wavering, by clinging to one thing: the gaslight. In American political culture, “gaslight” is the word for male manipulation in the shock two-step of patriarchy. But in the film, gaslight is also the thread of Paula’s salvation. It is the particular, singular material detail to which she clings as a port in the storm of Gregory’s domination.¹¹

In the evenings, when her husband claims to be out, strange things happen in the house, and they disturb Paula. Are they sounds and signs of some unworldly presence? Gregory is actually secretly rummaging in the attic looking for the jewels he plans to steal. (That is, instead of Jane Eyre’s husband with a secret in the attic, in Gaslight the husband is the secret in the attic.) When Gregory turns on the attic gaslights upstairs, the gas in the main floors’ lights goes down, and Paula notices but can’t explain it. If the gas goes up and down, why should that be? Surely it means something. She clings to this detail as a fact, though she cannot be sure of it, and she doesn’t know what to make of it.

John Locke (who assumes the tabula rasa—the blank slate—that Naomi Klein says practitioners of shock therapy and politics try to create) instructs us in his Essay on Human Understanding to limit our sensory apprehension to our own senses, to rely only on their “proper inlets” to take in the world and not to claim to see, hear, or know things we have not directly experienced through direct sensory apprehension. Such self-discipline can vouchsafe certain knowledge, he says, and fend off confusion.¹² He assumes things are what they are and are what they seem, but this is something women and minorities cannot safely assume. Thus, when Locke warns against nursemaids who infect their charges’ upper-class minds with stories of ghosts and fancies, he does not stop to ask why lower-class women might tell such stories or why children might be drawn to them. Both are subject to powers that move over them, often in mysterious ways, but Locke neutralizes the knowledge of the nursery. It is a gothic moment in his philosophical text.

In Gaslight, and in paranoid gothic films more generally, women’s direct experience confuses and does not orient.¹³ That is because the women are deprived of the common sense that Locke failed to note is necessary to our capacity to sense at all. Perhaps he failed to note it because he could take it for granted. Hannah Arendt notes it, though. It is actually, she says, “by virtue of common sense that the other sense perceptions are known to disclose reality and are not merely felt as irritations of our nerves or resistance sensations of our bodies.”¹⁴ The common sense—which is a kind of extrasensory perception, a sixth sense—is the underwriting power of all the senses. Without “common sense” we might twitch but we would not feel or know. Arendt did not have today’s media in mind, but nonetheless she provides the beginning of a critique of them for generating in us a certain twitchiness.¹⁵ (I think here of how one streaming platform is called Twitch.)

Locke’s empiricism can’t save Paula because she is made to doubt the evidence of her senses, and Arendt cannot help her, either, because although Paula continually seeks, she cannot find the common that sensory apprehension requires. She yearns to attend social gatherings to gauge the shared world in common with others and to be seen by others in ways that are different from how her husband sees her. But Gregory tells her she is too ill to go out. She checks with her longtime housekeeper, seeking to make common her sense that the gas in the lamplights is going up and down in the evenings. But the housekeeper says honestly that she has not noticed any change in lighting. She is an older woman, hard of hearing and apparently not sensitive to other sensory stimuli, either. In any case, she is not inclined to take Paula’s observations too seriously because Gregory has told her that Paula is ill and that her senses cannot be trusted.

The other woman in the household, younger than Paula (Angela Lansbury in her first film role) and hired by Gregory without consulting his wife and over her objections, is enlisted by Gregory to become part of the plot.¹⁶ When he flirts with the maid, he encourages her ill-mannered behavior with both his wife and the housekeeper. Through a kind of pretense of social egalitarianism that interests him not at all (accompanied by moments of noblesse but not oblige, during which he instructs Paula to command the servants more assertively), Gregory divides the women, positions Paula as unreliable, and makes himself head of the household he has married into and full owner of the property—Paula’s house—that is now his.¹⁷

When Gregory makes things disappear and blames Paula for their loss, he manipulates her psychologically, but he also performs in a gothic register the conventional legal script of marriage in which things that were once a woman’s become her husband’s to manage as he likes without her knowledge or consent.¹⁸ The film personalizes what the law does as a matter of course and structure. When Gregory talks to Paula pityingly and she comes to think she is pitiable, we see in compressed time how marriage in patriarchy can deconstruct and disorient a woman over a life. Paula seems bound for an insane asylum, which is Gregory’s deep desire: with her gone, he could search more freely for the jewels he craves but that so far elude him. Importantly, driving her insane is not just his criminal aim in a plot against her; it is also a structural dimension of ordinary marriage, to which some women nonetheless adapt well, or well enough, but others, who do not, suffer.

Paula is rescued. A Scotland Yard inspector, Brian Cameron (played by Joseph Cotten), finds a way into her house, where she is secluded. He has grown suspicious of her situation. Years earlier, as a boy, he met her aunt, Alice Alquist, a famous opera singer he admired. Alquist was murdered soon after and the case never solved. Cameron is struck by the physical resemblance between Alquist and the anxious young woman he has seen around London. When he finds out that Paula is actually Alquist’s niece, he wants to help. Paula is slow to trust him until Cameron shares with her his innocent admiration, as a boy of twelve, for her aunt, the opera star. He has brought proof: a glove once given to him by Paula’s aunt as a souvenir at a concert. Will it match an orphaned one left behind and now in her niece’s possession in a display case? Paula compares the gloves, and they match. Like the slipper in Cinderella, here too a pair of things reunited will remake the world.

Other things follow suit: a letter whose existence Gregory had denied is found in the desk Cameron dares to rummage through. Paula recognizes the letter. She had thought it was a clue to solving her aunt’s murder, but Gregory hid it away and told her it was a figment of her imagination. Cameron shows her that the letter, which is signed by a man of another name, is written in handwriting that matches Gregory’s, and now Paula can no longer doubt the evidence of her senses. Gregory is not who he says he is. All the fabrications and secrets that imprisoned her start to unravel, and Paula’s disorientation gives way to a worldly reorientation, confirmed in the company of another person and engineered by worldly things: an errant glove returned, the materiality of the letter, the matched handwriting, sounds from the attic, and the changing gaslight.

When the sounds now come from the attic, and the gaslight flickers, Paula is offered the further salvation of observing Cameron noticing the sights and sounds, too. Cameron follows the sensory clues and ascends to catch Gregory in the act of stealing the aunt’s missing jewels, which he has finally found. Cameron ties Gregory up in the attic, and Paula—newly confident of her own sanity—goes up to confront her now impotent husband. All along calling to mind Bruno, Hitchcock’s gay, obsessive villain in the later film Strangers on a Train (1951), Gregory is now even more openly feminized than before, and he confesses to Paula the obsession for which he betrayed her. He could not control his desire for the jewels, he explains, as he moves from domination to dependence, from an appearance of rational calm to uncontrolled feminized obsession. He tries to wheedle Paula into freeing him, and she toys with him, pretending to consider it. He falls for her feigning as she fell for his. The irony surely is that he had planned to turn Paula into the proverbial madwoman in the attic, and that has now become his fate, not hers. Gregory is arrested. Here we see how the law occludes its structural misogyny, which empowers men over women, by once in a while saving a good woman from an occasional bad man.

But what frees Paula, more fundamentally, is Cameron’s faith in the power of facts and in a facticity that depends upon and secures shared experience among plural others.¹⁹ Cameron seems to understand the need to provide Paula with a source of epistemic certainty to break the spell of Anton’s mesmerism. Locke’s empiricism flexes its muscles here, but we see how Arendt’s common sense is also necessary, and it is that which was denied to Paula, in isolation.

In the end, the film may seem to have a rather naive faith in the power of the true to triumph over the false. After all, for us, in today’s online world, reality is manipulated not by just one man, bubbles of isolation are much harder to burst, and handwriting’s giveaway is almost a thing of the past (though digital markers do leave behind “fingerprints”). Ascertaining the truth or falsity of online claims means we must distinguish the Brian Camerons from the shock doctors like Klein’s Ewen Cameron and from the Gregory Antons in an arena where individual agency defies location even by the most powerful discernments. Or we may dispense with such men entirely and follow our own lights, even though, in so doing, we risk slipping into the individualism of the U.S. where we live by the rule of caveat emptor and make truth into a product we may choose to buy, or not, with the decision being a matter of everyone’s individual responsibility. “Make up your own mind!” and “I don’t buy it” are familiar phrases for this reason.

But Gaslight gets one thing quite right. Truth is in trouble against domination. Truth requires an infrastructure, and popular subscription to it is one of truth’s essential features. Truth cannot survive in isolation, not for long. It depends on the corroboration of others—what Hannah Arendt called “plurality” (hence we sometimes ask, “Do you see what I see?”)—and on the facticity of material evidence. It depends on public things and institutions, including those that claim truth as their foundation. Here the curious American phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident” perfectly captures the situation. If the truths we live by are self-evident, why do we have to hold them? Don’t they hold us?²⁰ Yes, but we have to hold them, too, or they may give way. A chair holds us, but if we allow it to fall into disrepair, it may one day collapse and land us with a hard thud on the hard floor.²¹

Holding the truth now means rebutting false claims of disinformation, but such rebuttals also energize false claims, increasing the life of their news cycle, widening their impact, and contributing further to a sense of helplessness and civic exhaustion. The heroines of female gothics and paranoid gothic film are helpful here, since they too are plagued by helplessness and exhaustion. Now, in the context of the post-9/11 American shock politics of the twenty-first century, gothic women’s exemplary return to feeling and sensation is instructive. Gaslight, in particular, is instructive because it does not just document the infliction of sensory degradation on a woman by a domineering man.²² It is also about her return to her senses. This is what the changing gaslight represents. She sees the lighting change, and, her sensory confusion notwithstanding, she clings to that fact and will not let it go. That is why she can be summoned back to the shared world. In the face of deprivation and disorientation, she never let it go.

We see something similar in the television streaming series Stranger Things. In Season 1, Joyce Byers’s son Will is missing.²³ The boy is trapped in a parallel world, but she does not know that yet. She just knows he is gone. She notices lights turning on and off in her house. Everyone else (the sheriff, her older son) says it is a “power surge,” but Joyce, like Paula in Gaslight, tunes in to the light. Joyce, who has suffered (poverty, divorce), is not subjected to deliberate sensory deprivation. No one has been working full time to make her doubt herself. Still, it is remarkable that she can trust her senses in the absence of sensorial sharedness. She is a singular character, bound and determined, not deterred by others’ doubts. It helps that she is a little bit mad or quirky, plucky in the way some small-town poor people are depicted on TV. So she is quite used to going her own way. She knows the flickering lights are a direct communication from her missing child.

She says, “I know what I saw and I’m not crazy.” And she knows what she needs: “I need you to believe me,” she says to the sheriff, who is also an old friend. Unkempt, armed with an ax, with Christmas lights strung all around the house (she has put them up to facilitate further communication with Will), she certainly starts to look crazy. But, as in Gaslight, evidence mounts up (a photograph captures the image of a monster, a birthmark is missing from her son’s supposed corpse, a stick figure drawing said to be Will’s cannot be his because he draws well, like an artist), the doubters come around, and Joyce is reentered into a shared world of sorts.

We learn from Joyce Byers’s example, as from Paula’s, the importance of fixing on what we know and working from there in concert with others to resensitize senses deadened by domination or disaster and to find in the material world points of orientation that can be relied upon for reorientation during and after disaster. Of the two, however, Joyce is the better detective. Unlike Paula, Joyce has no treasure in the attic, no maids, no art, no breathtaking beauty; just a son, dearly loved and hidden in a clubhouse she cannot get to. Unlike Paula, Joyce does not rely on a lawman to figure out the meaning of the changing lights. Joyce, who is older than Paula and has been through more—divorced, single working mother, poor, with two kids—figures things out for herself, and though everyone starts to think she is mad, she doggedly finds a way to bring the lawman around.

By the end of Gaslight, Paula is single, too, but wealthy, privileged, and secure. Importantly, Paula’s liberation from Gregory is not tethered to the promise of a happy marriage to another, notwithstanding a nosy neighbor’s assumption to the contrary when she sees Paula and Cameron chatting on the rooftop as the film closes. The film’s near-refusal of the conventional romantic happy ending is what makes it possible to see the film as a critique of (the law of) marriage, as such, and not just of this one man and this one marriage. By contrast with Cinderella, who puts on the slipper brought by the prince, Paula is not expected to try on the glove brought by Cameron; it isn’t hers. Thus, the film implies that Paula will be liberated not just from Gregory but from marriage, as such, and all its fairytale promises.

It matters, surely, that Paula’s rescue is not yet another episode of the traffic in women. But this mattering cuts two ways, because Paula’s freedom is also not an achievement of true sex-gender equality. It seems to depend on the demasculinization of the men in her vicinity. Gregory is feminized or queered in the attic, and even Cameron himself is infantilized when he confides that the glove he brings to Paula as a kind of security was gifted to him when he was a mere boy of twelve. Paula’s aunt, Alice Alquist, had joked that she had a “secret admirer” to whom she had given that missing glove, but she had never mentioned he was just a boy. When Cameron now shares that fact with Paula, she begins to trust him. Why? Is it the glove he produces as evidence, from his boyhood? Or might it be the boyhood to which he is relegated by the glove? If the latter, then female freedom means male emasculation, and that is surely a message for the film’s heteronormative male viewers about what is at stake in maintaining epistemic control of their households.

This is how things play out for Jane Eyre, too, in the novel named for her. Like Paula in Gaslight, Jane is lied to and betrayed by the man she loves. Her employer, Mr. Rochester, lies to Jane about noises coming from the attic, and, on the day of their planned wedding, Jane finds out that Rochester is already married. (In Gaslight, Gregory Anton is already married, too; his wife is in Prague, Cameron tells Paula.) Rochester’s first wife is Bertha Mason, a “Creole” woman he married in Jamaica, and whom he has hidden away in the attic of his English estate.²⁴ She was hidden away because she was mad, it is said, though we may wonder whether she has been made mad because she is locked away. Shocked by these revelations, announced by Bertha’s brother who arrives in the nick of time, Jane leaves hastily, with no particular plan or destination. She is later taken in by a family named Rivers.²⁵ In their company, her sensibilities and self-worth regenerate. It is as if Jane knows Hannah Arendt’s claim is true, that the senses rely for their sensory apprehensions not just on stimuli—which on their own can produce only irritations—but on common sense and a common world.

For women in patriarchy, though, the usual common sense is not enough, because it is not innocent. It is a gendered and raced partition of the sensible or the sensory. In such a context, where their perspectives and perceptions are devalued, some women stay true to their senses, but that is hard to sustain as individuals. Some are fortunate to find alternative community and make kinships whose perspective rivals the dominant one. For Jane Eyre, this is the gift of the Rivers household into which she lands. It becomes a female household after she refuses marriage to the brother, St. John, a missionary who departs for what Gayatri Spivak calls his “soul-making” work abroad, in India, only to die there.²⁶

Similarly, in Toni Morrison’s gothic Home, a vibrant women’s community serves as a place of rescue and healing. Home rewrites the gothic/gaslight script: the gaslighting and torture that almost kill a young woman are raced and classed, as well as gendered. Cee, a young Black woman from a tiny rural town, could not have less in common with Gaslight’s Paula, white, wealthy, and worldly. And yet, like Paula, Cee is haunted by childhood trauma—both stumbled, as children, onto a murdered body—orphaned, and landed in the household of a man who seeks to take everything from her.

In Cee’s case, the household belongs to Dr. Beau, a white doctor outside Atlanta, who employs Cee, a young Black woman, to work as his live-in helper. Unbeknownst to Cee, the doctor likes to experiment on people. His wife tells Cee he is “no Dr. Frankenstein,” but that turns out to be true only in the sense that Frankenstein gives birth to something, albeit monstrous, while this doctor, who studies wombs, monstrously kills or sickens everything he touches.²⁷ His name is short for Beauregard, and he is, as his name suggests, a eugenicist.

Cee thinks she has landed in heaven. She is well-paid, well-fed by the household’s friendly Black housekeeper, ensconced in a well-enough-appointed room, and enlisted respectfully enough by her employer to help with his patients. But the doctor is a Mengele who experiments on her, and, “improving the speculum,” he plumbs the depths of her womb, nearly kills her, and leaves her barren.²⁸

Like Paula, Cee tries early on to focus her senses on details that might help her keep her bearings. But in spite of her name, she cannot see what is before her eyes. For example, Cee notices the titles on the bookcases of the doctor’s study: “Out of the Night. Must be a mystery, she thought.” There is a mystery here but not quite in the way she thinks. The other books that catch her eye are “The Passing of the Great Race, and next to it, Heredity, Race and Society.” She resolves to study and understand what the educated man reads: “How small, how useless was her schooling, she thought, and promised herself she would find time to read about and understand ‘eugenics.’”²⁹

In the end she will be schooled, but not by those books. After she is rescued, a superior sensory education is freely provided her by a group of illiterate Black women who had “the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen sense of smell and hearing.”³⁰ Cee is brought, nearly dead, by her brother Frank to the women healers back in their hometown of Lotus, Georgia. The women banish Frank from their midst. “They believed his maleness would worsen her condition.”³¹ And they return Cee to full sensation, drawing on quirky practices of restoration. She is instructed to lie with her legs open to the sun for an hour every day. “Sun-smacked” is their cure for the shell-shocked. When Cee says, “How could I have known what he was up to?,” these “country women who loved mean” reply, “Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake—otherwise it just walks in your door.” And Cee comes to understand: “She had been stupid, eager to please.” She learns from Miss Ethel, who says, “Look to yourself, You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seed your own land.” It is a lesson we cannot be sure Paula learns, but Cee does: “She wanted to be the one who rescued her own self.”³²

These women, women with their “seen-it-all-eyes,” see what Cee could not. They are schooled in the shock politics of whiteness. They know they could lose their little bit of land to white violence any time any day, but they nonetheless invest in their garden. They build a buffer of faith, without illusions about its fragility. The buffer is made of the world’s tatters, woven together in the garden that beautifies land into vital ground, and they turn rags into folk quilts that tourists buy for money. In this setting, Cee is repatterned back into herself: “She could know the truth, accept it, and keep on quilting.”³³ But she is not whole.

In Morrison’s Home and in Jane Eyre and Gaslight, the women’s freedom and power seem to depend on the demasculinization or de-eroticization of the men in their vicinity or on their banishment. With St. John gone, Jane lives for a time with the Rivers sisters in a women’s-only household. When she returns to Rochester, he has been hobbled and blinded. The cause was a fire at his home that also killed Bertha Mason, who found a way finally to assert her truth against her husband’s deceit. Jane will marry Rochester, but he is now dependent on her care, which means the partnership is more maternal than marital. In some sense, then, might he have remained married to Bertha Mason, after all? In another female gothic, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the story ends with the new Mrs. de Winter displacing her troubled matrimonial relation to her husband with a new maternal one. “I held my arms out to him and he came to me like a child.”³⁴ So, too, in Gaslight, Cameron is infantilized, subtly, when he presents himself to Paula as the twelve-yearold he once was. And in Home, Cee, who is told she cannot bear children, enters into a non-erotic domestic partnership with her brother, Frank, for whom she cooks and homekeeps. Is the freedom achieved by gothic women only the small freedom that comes from being moved off the register of erotic heterosexuality and onto a maternal plane?³⁵ Is that a freedom at all?

Feminist criticism might seem a small freedom, too; its careful reading more a balm, or placebo, than a canny tactic for those caught in a storm of patriarchal inequality or trapped inside on its sunny days. Feminist criticism is powerful because it devotes itself to detail in order to ground itself, and, by chasing wild threads of meaning, it recreates the fabric of what Arendt called the in-between on which worldliness depends.³⁶ It does its forensic and fabulist work compassed by the sensory and the normative, attentive to their coimplication in the partition of the sensible that is patriarchy and its partners.