Fiery swirls of slime - erotic disgust in Aurora Leigh

Aurora Leigh's cousin Romney, with whom she is in love, is getting married.  A Fourierist, he believed that the seas would turn to lemonade, although that's not relevant here.  A dedicated, humorless, social reformer, Romney is marrying a woman from the lumpenproletariat who can help him operate his phalanstery.  True to his beliefs, he invites London's lumpen to his wedding:

Of course the people came in uncompelled,
Lame, blind, and worse–sick, sorrowful, and worse,
The humours of the peccant social wound
All pressed out, poured out upon Pimlico.  (4.542-5)

That sounds terrbile.  Sickening, even.

Exasperating the unaccustomed air
With hideous interfusion: you'd suppose
A finished generation, dead of plague,
Swept outward from their graves into the sun,
The moil of death upon them. (4. 546-50)

What a strange piece of personification, the air becoming exasperated by these stinking poor people.  The voice here is Aurora's.  This is our heroine, brilliant, successful, thoughtful, reacting to the presence of the impoverished.  She could have married Romney and worked side by side with him, helping these horrible people.

Here's my favorite part:

They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church
In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,
The noble ladies stood up in their pews,
Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,
Some simply curious , some just insolent,
And some in wondering scorn,–'What next? what next?' (4.553-558)

And it only gets better.  The unwashed masses move toward the altar "As bruised snakes crawl" (4.566).  They have faces that one does not usually see "in the open day,"  forgotten babies, beaten children:

Those, faces! 'twas as if you had stirred up hell
To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime (4.587-9)
 

This is, of course, obviously, all about sex, Aurora Leigh's panicky sense of losing the possibility of sex.  That's the source of the physicality of her disgust.  Aurora is normally not so mean-spirited! 
 
The novel, at its center, is about Aurora Leigh's integrity as a poet, and the sacrifices she has to make.  To be a poet, she cannot marry, since to marry would be to subsume her identity under her husband's, and more importantly, perhaps, to give up her time to his causes.  But in her social world, there is no other path to a physical relationship.  The novel, so dry and abstract in places, becomes sensual, even erotic (although abstractly!) in others.  See the amazing numbers of references to and images of breasts, for example - now there is a post I don't want to write.  Let me refer the interested reader to the same Novel Readings post I linked yesterday, which contains some fine examples.
 
Aurora Leigh is a surprisingly weird book.

Stiff, dubious-statured with the weight of years - wrestling with Aurora Leigh

I just finished Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), a novel in blank verse about the struggles, romantic and professional, of a lady poet.  Do I want to write abou it?  I'm not sure.  I was inspired to read it by this post of Rohan Maitzen's, in which she describes how wild the book can be.  It's a frustrating book, alternately brilliant, then weird, then as dull as its blank verse peers.  Like The Prelude, like Paradise Lost, it was an easy book for me to not pick up.  Browning's blank verse was both compressed and prolix, giving the text a density that was sometimes hard to penetrate.

So it was not an easy book to read, at least in places, and is so thickly meaningful that it is not an easy book to understand.  Let me go the heart of the problem.  The scene is, let's see, the poet Aurora Leigh has fled her romantic troubles.  She is in Florence, depressed, not writing (her last book is a surprise hit), not doing anything:

I did not write, nor read, nor even think,
But sate absorbed amid the quickening glooms,
Most like some passive broken lump of salt
Dropt in by chance to a bowl of œnomel
To spoil the drink a little and lose itself,
Dissolving slowly, slowly until lost. (7,1306-11)

This is, top to bottom, superb blank verse, with one little lump of salt right in the middle.  This reader was stopped dead by "œnomel."  Those more skilled in languages, Meine Frau, for example, will be able to use the roots (œno = wine, mel = honey) to discover the honeyed wine concealed within the word.  I had to go to the Norton Critical Edition's footnote ("used as a beverage by the ancient Greeks (OED)").  Reading Aurora Leigh was a hiccupy experience for me, a bumpy ride.  EBB, as the footnotes call her, turns out to have the same vice as her husband, RB:  they are both obscure without knowing it.

Aurora Leigh is worth the struggle, the up-and-down, text-to-note eyestrain.   I'm now convinced it is an Essential Victorian Book, like Carlyle's Past and Present, to which it often refers.  But it takes work:

                             Alas, the best of books
Is but a word in Art, which soon grows cramped,
Stiff, dubious-statured with the weight of years,
And drops an accent or digamma down
Some cranny of unfathomable time,
Beyond the critic's reaching. (7.884-9)

Look, she did it again!  I'll leave "digamma" to the curious Googler.  And I'll write about the wedding scene tomorrow.  The wedding scene is fantastic.