Words by Wendy Parkins
In the 1970s, the feminist poet Adrienne Rich described the ‘gaslighting’ of women that takes place in societies where only the experience of men is recognised as real or valid. Women, therefore, have an obligation to each other, Rich argued: “Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.”
Fast forward fifty years or so: do Rich’s words still ring true now? Or does her brand of 70s feminism sound a little too earnest, or perhaps too simplistic? Gaslighting was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2022, and it’s commonly understood as the psychological manipulation of a person that causes them to question their perception of reality and/or doubt their sanity, with the effect that the victim becomes highly dependent on the perpetrator. For me, then, the question I had to resolve when setting out to write The Defiance of Frances Dickinson, a historical novel about a real woman and her abusive marriage in the mid-nineteenth century, was: can historical stories about gaslighting, even true ones, offer anything of value to our understanding of women’s lives today?
The story of Frances Dickinson, who married at the age of eighteen in 1838, provides an almost textbook instance of gaslighting – firstly by her husband and his extended family, later by medical ‘experts’ and the legal system. From the beginning of her marriage, Frances’s husband John exerted what we would now call coercive control over his wife. Like gaslighting, coercive control is designed to undermine the autonomy of another person, by subjecting them to various forms of abuse, that might or might not include physical violence. Research has shown that coercive control operates most frequently in heterosexual relationships, where men (consciously or otherwise) use social norms of masculinity and femininity to dominate their partners by, for instance, intimidation and isolation.
For long periods of their marriage, Frances and John lived in the same house as John’s extended family and, in later court documents, the family were shown to have shared in the gaslighting used against Frances: they refused, for instance, to acknowledge that Frances suffered any kind of abuse from John – physical, verbal or psychological – despite other reports of such abuse from independent eyewitnesses. The fact that other women (such as John’s mother and sister) always remained unrepentant defenders of an abuser, blaming Frances alone for conflict in the marriage, makes for very difficult reading in the legal documents.
Having an extensive archival record of marital violence and its resulting trauma at my disposal, however, presented other significant challenges in writing The Defiance of Frances Dickinson as well. If, as I believe, it is important to re-tell Frances’ story, how should I do so in order to avoid a gratuitous or salacious account of someone else’s trauma? As Parul Sehgal complained in The New Yorker, trauma narratives in recent fiction and memoir are increasingly hackneyed, as well as exploitative. “The invocation of trauma,” she writes, “promises access to some well-guarded bloody chamber; increasingly, though, we feel as if we have entered a rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover.” When even Ted Lasso is revealed to suffer from childhood trauma, Sehgal continues, “Trauma has become synonymous with backstory,” and thus a lazy resort by writers at the expense of more subtle characterisation or plotting.
In depicting Frances’ abuse and trauma, then, it was important to convey how her experience combined a daily life of privilege (she had been an heiress since she was seven) with sickening instances of abuse, including rape, in a way that was historically accurate and psychologically plausible, but also sensitive to a real woman’s suffering. While the legal documents leave a modern reader in little doubt that rape was not infrequent during her marriage, I made a decision to minimise the episodes of sexual violence in the novel, for instance, to resist adding to the needless proliferation of violence against women in so many true crime stories, on page and screen. At the same time, I wanted to avoid a simplistic account of either
victimhood or heroism. Frances Dickinson was a complex woman in circumstances
that elude easy explanation from a twenty-first century perspective: she was a rich white woman from the English gentry class, who took her privilege for granted. Her story often made me uncomfortable and I wanted the novel I wrote about her not to gloss over such discomfort.
I don’t think people in the past are ‘just like us’ but dressed in different clothes. I’m not sure Frances is always ‘relatable’ as a heroine and I think that’s important for readers to think about. It is an essential aspect of her story that Frances Dickinson’s wealth, status and education were unable to prevent her disempowerment as a married woman and thus her prolonged exposure to brutal abuse for years. Seeking to write from a feminist perspective about a real woman who lived before modern feminist theory, and before modern psychological understandings of trauma and abuse, I wanted to figure out how Frances— gaslit, isolated, and under her husband’s control—managed to hold on to a belief that she deserved better, that she was entitled to be treated as if she were a human being of the same value as any man. Somehow, Frances consistently refused to accept the distorted version of reality imposed on her by John and his family, always insisting that she had a right to determine her own life, and make her own decisions about her body, her future, her property, and her children.
If her story still has the power to provoke outrage, as I believe it does, it is imperative that such stories should not be forgotten. We ignore the past at our peril, as recent erasure of women’s hard-won rights in many countries has begun to show. So I still share Adrienne Rich’s belief that women “have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other” and I hope that The Defiance of Frances Dickinson might contribute to that project in some way.
