{"id":2135,"date":"2025-02-22T08:20:56","date_gmt":"2025-02-22T08:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2135"},"modified":"2025-02-23T01:19:43","modified_gmt":"2025-02-23T01:19:43","slug":"the-romantic-art-of-handshaking-the-walter-hartright-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/02\/22\/the-romantic-art-of-handshaking-the-walter-hartright-story\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Romantic Art of Handshaking”: The Walter Hartright Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Throughout <\/span><\/span>The Woman in White, <\/span><\/span>Wilkie Collins <\/span>uses a lot of flowery, over the top language to describe simple interactions between Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie. <\/span>These interactions, exclusively described from Walter\u2019s perspective, convincingly portray the pent up sexual and romantic tension between the two. In Victorian<\/span> society, English men and women were forbidden from discussing\u00a0topics such as sex and desire openly<\/span>, because<\/span> they were considered extremely taboo. <\/span>According to an excerpt from <\/span><\/span>Sex, Scandal, and the Novel <\/span>\u201c<\/span><\/span>sexual <\/span>unspeakability<\/span> does not function simply <\/span>as a collection of prohibitions for Victorian writers. Rather, it affords them abundant opportunities <\/span>to develop an elaborate discourse \u2013 richly ambiguous, subtly coded, <\/span>prolix<\/span> and polyvalent \u2013 that we now recognize and <\/span>designate<\/span> by the very term <\/span><\/span>literary<\/span>\u201d <\/span><\/span>(<\/span>Cohen 3). <\/span>Essentially, the<\/span> strict nature of Victorian society as it relates to <\/span>sexuality caused Victorian authors to develop their own covert methods for describing<\/span> sexual desire and passion. Many of Walter\u2019s passages are devoted to <\/span>romanticizing his relationship with Laura, especially when describing their early interactions when they were merely student and teacher. <\/span>When lamenting about his feelings for her, he writes \u201cYes my <\/span>hardly-earned<\/span> self-control was completely lost to me as if I had <\/span>never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned\u201d (Colli<\/span>ns 66). With this statement, Walter is acknowledging an age-old sentiment that women are \u201ctemptations\u201d to men, and that <\/span>the trap of womanly wiles must be avoided for it can be disastrous in certain situations. <\/span>He continues \u201cI 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 <\/span>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 tou<\/span>ched any other woman\u2019s before\u201d (Collins 66). It is <\/span>evident<\/span> in the way that Hartright carefully chooses his words<\/span> 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<\/span>. <\/span>For example, when he mentions the thrill of touching her, he <\/span>immediately<\/span> clarifies that they only made physical contact <\/span>through the chaste gesture of shaking hands.<\/span> Because <\/span>Walter<\/span> is prevented from acting on his feelings due <\/span>to his position and the expectations of polite<\/span> Victorian society, he is relegated to waxing poetic about his painful experience of falling for La<\/span>ura. <\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s perspective, convincingly portray the pent up sexual and romantic tension between the two. In Victorian society, English men and women were forbidden from … Continue reading “The Romantic Art of Handshaking”: The Walter Hartright Story<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5333,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5333"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}