Errors in Beauty

Lyric Voice and Blazons in Three Late-Medieval Texts

According to Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being Just, the experience of beauty is almost always accompanied by the experience of being in error—the error of not having noticed either an object’s beauty or its flaws. I would also suggest that the experience of beauty is much like being in love. In this paper I argue that the voices of blazons in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Eustache Deschamps’s lyric “Sui je belle,” and the anonymous Middle English lyric “Selver Whyte” call attention to errors in women’s beauty, errors that might be said to thwart love.

Two of these texts are lyrics, while The Miller's Tale has much lyric song in it. To me this raises the question of why lyric should be so closely associated with errors in female beauty. Perhaps it is because the voice of lyric has long been associated with derne (secret) love. Lyric pictures what should not be seen and voices what should not be heard. In revealing hidden desires, it complicates the heard and seen experience of beauty, and increases the possibilities for error. The lyric blazon is thus a worthy companion of unrecognized beauty and obstacles to love.