Once, so the
story goes, King Arthur encountered a terrible giant. Helpless before the
giant’s great strength, Arthur seemed doomed. The giant, however, offered Arthur the
chance to gain his freedom by answering a riddle. But if he did not give the right
answer, the king and his kingdom would be the giant’s. Having little choice, Arthur
asked for the riddle. The giant responded, “What one thing above all else do women
desire?” Arthur went throughout the land, asking every woman he met what she most
wanted. He collected a multitude of responses, but all were different and he feared
none would satisfy the giant.
Then Arthur
came upon a most hideous woman, a sort of witch, in the forest. So
appalling was her appearance, he nearly fainted away at the sight. The loathly lady
berated him for his disdain, saying that while she might be able to help him in his
distress, she would aid no one who was not courteous. Arthur pulled himself together
to tell her his problem. After making him swear to grant whatever boon she asked of
him, the woman gave Arthur the answer to the giant’s riddle. Unlike all the other
answers that he had collected, this one rang true. Arthur met the giant at the
appointed time and give him the hideous damsel’s answer: “A woman desires above
all else the right to freely exercise her own will.” With a terrible oath, the giant
confessed that was indeed the correct response.
Arthur joyfully
returned to the woman to thank her, only to be utterly dismayed by her
demand that she be wed to a knight of the Round Table. Arthur returned to his castle
to reluctantly relate his adventure and the loathly lady’s request for something that he
could not bring himself to ask of any man. Gawain, however, without hesitation offered
himself as husband to the ill-favored dame.
After their
wedding banquet, Gawain led his bride to their chamber. With sinking
heart, he turned towards her. To his great astonishment, he saw not the hideous
woman, but the most beautiful maiden he had ever beheld. She explained that an
enchantment had caused her to take on the hideous form. The spell could only be
broken if the greatest knight in Britain married her of his own free will, as had
happened that day. But she was not yet entirely free. She told Gawain that he must
decide whether she was to be beautiful by day and ugly by night, or ugly by day and
beautiful by night.
Gawain thought
for a while before telling his now beloved wife that the choice was hers
to make. Joyfully, the lady told Gawain that the spell was now completely broken. She
would henceforth always be her beautiful self, for he had truly grasped the answer to
the riddle.
Some versions
of the tale say that Lady Ragnell was the victim of a plot by her evil
stepmother and giant stepbrother. Others assert that the giant was actually Ragnell's
brother, who too had been cursed by their terrible stepmother. The evil stepmother is
a variant of the witch, and once again, as with Eve and Pandora, it seems that a woman
is responsible for everything that goes wrong. But reading between the lines, we find
another interpretation.
While the complexities
of mother-daughter relations are well beyond this discussion,
the evil stepmother who persecutes the heroine in many tales is an all too accurate
description of the process in which mothers, denied “the right to freely exercise their
own wills,” collude with patriarchy in keeping their daughters in the place assigned to
women. Women, as well as men, often fear the feminine and try to deny it its rightful
place beside the masculine. Internalized misogyny is a powerful, unrecognized force in
the lives of many women. The ability of a man to lovingly respect a woman for who she
is can go a long way towards breaking the spell that has led her to believe that she is
an inadequate human being, doomed to a lifetime of victimization simply because she
is female.
The war of the
sexes is a contest in which there are no winners. Tales of courtly love
and knightly quest remind us that the goal is achieved not through power but by
courtesy and respect. The royal wedding, the joining of the two into a whole much
greater than the sum of its parts, occurs only when each partner honors the inherent
right of the other to freely choose who she or he will be. Men and women alike have
been too long held spellbound by gender expectations. As women are freed from
traditional roles, the power of the male stereotypes that drive men to destroy
themselves and others in futile attempts to prove themselves men is also lessened.
1. David Borenstein
