White Hands
White Hands - meaning Summary
Compulsion and Social Performance
The poem depicts a respectable Midwestern woman repeatedly admitted to a sanatorium for obsessive handwashing. Small biographical details — a husband who makes cornices and her readings on Victorian poets — suggest social standing and cultured identity. The repeated ritual, even in sleep, exposes a compulsion that undermines her public persona. The final image of the physician watching implies clinical distance and the medicalization of private suffering.
Read Complete AnalysesFOR the second time in a year this lady with the white hands is brought to the west room second floor of a famous sanatorium. Her husband is a cornice manufacturer in an Iowa town and the lady has often read papers on Victorian poets before the local literary club. Yesterday she washed her hands forty seven times during her waking hours and in her sleep moaned restlessly attempting to clean imaginary soiled spots off her hands. Now the head physician touches his chin with a crooked forefinger.
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