Task 1.2 - Anaylsis of Geoffrey of Vinsauf

First, put in your own words what Geoffrey is saying.

Geoffrey is saying that I have no hope to describe a dumpy Chinese guy like that. Heh, just kidding.

Geoffrey is talking about the ideal woman and what nature would create of the ideal woman. Her head should be spherical, her hair glowing, her eyebrows dark, her nose straight and moderately sized (I had to laugh at that one), her eyes bright, and her face should (at least I take him to say), be milky-white (as all of her skin should be), but melting into rosiness and fullness of color. She should have a small but brightly colored mouth, full (but moderately so--I can't help laughing at this) lips which should be very full of color. Her teeth should be white, straight, and homogeneous in size, and he breath should smell good--even sweet. He chin should be smooth and well built as if it were sculpted. Her neck should be like a pillar. Her shoulders, like everything else, should be a balance--neither sloping nor awkwardly rising--just gracefully straight. Everything on her should be graceful and proportioned. Her limbs--legs and arms, should be just sort of flowing out of her. She should be extremely thin. Her feet should be small.

Second, note the interesting ways he goes about saying these things. What structures does he employ? That is, what order does he put the description, and what does he include? What does he leave out?

One interesting thing that he seems to do is leave out any specifics. Instead every part described is vague. Instead of giving specifics, he simply appeals to certain phrases. For example, as I noted in my summary, he never says specifically what the length of this person's arm is, or what her shoulders really look like. Instead of specifics, he believes balance and moderation is the most beautiful, so he leans on words such as these and emphasizes these sort of things. Rather than say anything substantial about her chin, he just says it is as if a sculptor made it. This is what jumps out to me the most--his appeal to balance and his use of vagueness. I think the point (and I could be wrong here), is use the readers own mind to construct what he believes the ideal woman looks like, merely prompting him with descriptive terms like her arms are "charming and graceful in length". This actually says nothing about her arms, but I already have an idea in my mind of what a perfect, gracefully flowing arm is like, so the image just comes to me.

The order of his description is top to bottom, starting with her hair and ending with her feet. I'm not sure what the significance of this is other than that it is the way most people look at a person (well depending on what they were wearing, maybe you'd start at other places...). If I were to do a description like this though, I would start off describing her eyes and then the rest of her face, mentioning her hair as framing it all. Then I'd work my way down. This is the way I tend to look at people first--I usually don't start at their hair.

He goes into great detail regarding the face, even talking about the separation of the eyebrows. Her face, in fact, seems to glow. After the great detail of the face, specifics drop off, everything else sort of flowing down from there. After describing the waist (which struck me as a little obscenely thin--"so slim that a hand may encircle it"? Ew.) he says that the "other parts" are left of to the imagination, but he assures us that they are wondrous. Other than that, he doesn't really leave anything out as far as I can tell. He seems very fixed on the physical aspect and gracefulness, and doesn't bother to describe anything that might hint at personality.