Throughout The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins uses a lot of flowery, over the top language to describe simple interactions between Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie. These interactions, exclusively described from Walter’s perspective, convincingly portray the pent up sexual and romantic tension between the two. In Victorian society, English men and women were forbidden from discussing topics such as sex and desire openly, because they were considered extremely taboo. According to an excerpt from Sex, Scandal, and the Novel “sexual unspeakability does not function simply as a collection of prohibitions for Victorian writers. Rather, it affords them abundant opportunities to develop an elaborate discourse – richly ambiguous, subtly coded, prolix and polyvalent – that we now recognize and designate by the very term literary” (Cohen 3). Essentially, the strict nature of Victorian society as it relates to sexuality caused Victorian authors to develop their own covert methods for describing sexual desire and passion. Many of Walter’s passages are devoted to romanticizing his relationship with Laura, especially when describing their early interactions when they were merely student and teacher. When lamenting about his feelings for her, he writes “Yes my hardly-earned self-control was completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned” (Collins 66). With this statement, Walter is acknowledging an age-old sentiment that women are “temptations” to men, and that the trap of womanly wiles must be avoided for it can be disastrous in certain situations. He continues “I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again-why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembers in no other women before- why I saw her, and heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman’s before” (Collins 66). It is evident in the way that Hartright carefully chooses his words so as not to so much as approach vulgarity when describing his attraction to Laura, that he is trying to be the perfect British gentlemen. For example, when he mentions the thrill of touching her, he immediately clarifies that they only made physical contact through the chaste gesture of shaking hands. Because Walter is prevented from acting on his feelings due to his position and the expectations of polite Victorian society, he is relegated to waxing poetic about his painful experience of falling for Laura.