Polly young-eisendrath, ph. D

In the medieval period, when the tale originated, the power of the mythical hag to rob people of their vitality was well-known to audiences. The hag was said to ride the bodies of men and children at night while they were sleeping, absorbing their vigor into herself. In the morning her victims would wake to feeble will and lifeless gloom. Her kiss was her most potent weapon. Getting close to her lips meant risking having your soul sucked out. A medieval audience would have appreciated Gawain's courage in kissing his bride so directly. They would also have guessed that he performed this act without hesitation because he sensed Ragnell's true nature. He would have been thought to have seen beyond her appearance in order to trust that she was not really a destructive hag who would exhaust and dominate him.

Stories about the evil power of the hag were one way that earlier societies demeaned and demonized female power. Portraying female power as devitalizing, overwhelming, poisonous — especially for unsuspecting men and children—encouraged a belief in a negative emotional spell that could be cast exclusively by a demanding woman.

Today when women want to be wanted they unintentionally reinforce the misogynist belief that a demanding woman is to be dreaded and subdued. When we act as though our desires are too powerful and can overtake another's free will or good sense, we reinvent the negative psychology of the hag-bitch. We are at risk of identifying ourselves and our desires with an alien, almost superhuman emotional power.

When Anne, for example, prefaces her own needs or wants with phrases such as ^"Do you mind if I . . ." or "It would be so nice if you . . . ," she implies that she wants something especially burdensome or difficult that cannot be stated directly. When we cloak our desires in niceties and seductions, we protect ourselves from being known directly and imply that others must always be nice to us. This kind of eggshell quality of female desire suggests that our needs must be hidden, that they are dangerous.

In therapy sessions I often remind people that direct requests for reassurance, appreciation, even compliments are necessary when the need is urgent. Women frequently challenge me, saying, "That spoils the effect. People should just give these things spontaneously." My response is that there are no shoulds when it comes to such interpersonal supports, and that clear and direct communication avoids the indirect message that others must intuit our desires. Attempting to evoke responses from others without claiming one's needs not only is confusing but carries the hidden meaning of danger—that something is so troubling it cannot be put into words.

It is only when we speak directly, with a secure self-confidence, that we step outside this negative meaning of female desire. Recognizing our desires as human-size (rather than monstrous) means that we can speak about them calmly and clearly. Although she was doomed to be a loathsome lady, Ragnell knew that her needs and desires were acceptable. She made her demands to King Arthur in a way that showed confi­dence in herself and her knowledge that Gawain had a choice in responding to her. She did not apologize, nor did she blame. She spoke boldly from her heart.

16 WOMEN AND DESIRE Wanting to Be Wanted 17

But, as many women have pointed out to me, Ragnell does not win her freedom all by herself. She has to conform to the conditions set by her stepbrother: that the greatest knight in all of Britain must agree to marry her, and that this knight, her husband, must grant her the power of her own sovereignty, the right to make her own choices. For some readers these conditions seem to diminish Ragnell^'s accomplishments. But we should not be too literal in our understanding of this tale.

The story of Ragnell symbolizes the development of a woman's self-determination within the confines of a patriarchal tradition that demanded that she give up her rights and property after she married. Ragnell has to depend on men in power to assist her in becoming a free agent, but that is not so different from our situation today. At no point is Ragnell passive, compliant, or indirect. She defies her stepbrother and finds a way to meet his conditions. She even confronts the king, telling him that he does not know what a woman desires. She watches her new husband carefully, and she skillfully presents her challenge to be taken seriously (to kiss her) at a moment when it is likely to be most effective. And, ultimately, she is aware that she cannot become self-determining without relying on others; she poses her questions to Gawain to test him, to see if he has grasped the fundamental dilemma of her life.

Ragnell symbolizes a process through which a woman claims the authority to be her own person, to command her own actions. When we first meet her, she is the dreaded hag-bitch, the symbol of the emotionally demanding woman. Yet we can tell that she is something more, for even the king is convinced of her wisdom. As the story progresses we are won over by her courage and good humor. We are pleased that she will not be

humiliated or subdued by the opinions of others. And finally, when Gawain comes forward to kiss her, we believe that he also senses something different about her. Of course he is startled by her transformation, as are we. What of this transformation? Not until Gawain kneels before her and answers well do we fully understand that she has been transformed not by his kiss but by the process of her own courage in pursuing her freedom and confronting her new husband.

By example, Ragnell shows us how to respond to the constraints of patriarchy in order to become a self-determining woman. First, she keeps her own counsel in the face of challenge. Although by all standards she is ugly, she is unconcerned about her appearance and definite in her stance. She is who she is. She speaks from her own authority in challenging her stepbrother and the king. She feels free to arrange her life according to her desires, even though she may be at risk for retaliations. She is knowledgeable about her desire for personal sovereignty, and she will not be discouraged by spells cast on her, insults, or rejections. She will not have her motives demeaned, even by the king.

The False Power of the Muse

To UNDERSTAND WHY, many hundreds of years later, it is still such a struggle for women to follow Ragnell's lead, we need to look more closely at the curse of her stepbrother, Gromer, who thought Ragnell was too bold and unwomanly in refusing his commands. She was a threat to his male dominance, the prototype of the uppity woman. So her stepbrother turned her into his image of that threat—an ugly, frightening hag, an emasculating bitch. His wish was that Ragnell would stay that

Nowhere can we see this more clearly than in Diana, Princess of Wales, the cultural muse of our time. Diana is the embodiment of a collective Object of Desire, a muse for the contemporary world. We used her image to inspire and excite us. Our hunger for her vitalizing effects is the crucial aspect of Diana's public appeal, in both her life and her death.

Diana herself was tragically caught in the female - power-is beauty belief. Witness her much-maligned fate: to be pursued relentlessly by publicists, photographers, and a public who felt that she belonged to them, and whom she courted tirelessly in her quest for stardom. Diana obsessively maintained a slender appearance, leading at one point to an eating disorder in which she vomited up to four times a day. Even after she had overcome this dangerous condition, she carefully controlled her diet and exercise. She was fatefully, desperately motivated by wanting to be wanted.

The ultimate Object of Desire, Diana sought romantic rela­tionships with untrustworthy partners, starting with the Prince of Wales. She may have been loved to some degree by each of her suitors, but their motives were mixed at best. Most of all they wanted her for what she symbolized rather than for the person she was. They used the power of her appearance, and her difficulties with self-esteem, to their own advantage and status. They did not return that power to her, as Gawain did to Ragnell. Diana was cursed as a muse as Ragnell was cursed as a hag. And, as we will see, the curse of the muse is often the more devastating: although the hag may not be wanted, or even loved, she can know her own desires if she chooses. The muse cannot, for as soon as she does, she ceases to be the muse.

Diana is a symbol of female desire at the end of the twentieth century. She portrays the conflict and confusion, shame and fascination of potentially liberated women trying to be Objects of Desire. We haunted her with our need to live vicariously through her, to be enlivened by her, until the tragic accident of her death expressed how brutally high the stakes are in this game. Tragically, Diana will always remain an Object of Desire—tragically because at the time of her death she was beginning to move toward the goal of claiming her own desires.

A Matter of Heart

DURING AND AFTER her divorce, Diana spoke out truth-fully and became a role model for other women who, in hearing about her personal struggles, seemed to feel a promise of release from their own shame and family secrets. As psychologist Carol Gilligan remarked, "In breaking out so publicly from an imprisonment of silence enforced by shame, Diana discovered that in speaking from her heart, she touched the hearts of others. Rather than shunning her, people embraced her. Because she felt psychologically homeless and shunned, she could reach out without the shadow of condescension to those who were physically homeless and to people shunned because of AIDS and leprosy.^" Admitting her vulnerabilities while maintaining her image of the desire-awakening maiden, Diana cracked open the belief that beauty alone can protect even a fairy-tale princess. Yet because of her untimely death, Diana may be remembered more for her beauty—that "effervescent, bubbly intoxication,^" as one reporter put it—than for her final courageous refusal to hide in shame and silence, unless we change our understanding of female desire.

Speaking the truth, as Diana had begun to do, is the only path out of the superficiality and false promises of wanting to be wanted to the possibilities of being loved. If wanting to be wanted is a matter of image, then wanting to be loved is a matter of heart. Being loved is being known in our own fallible, open, true spirit. As Ragnell shows us, being true to yourself does not mean judging or blaming or letting your tongue roll with nasty, accusatory words. Rather, it means speaking your own thoughts and feelings with respect for others, without try­ing to cover up the harsh bits or the rough edges in order to keep your image shiny and clean.

When we live by the truth, we discover what constitutes not only our individual nature but also our fundamental humanity. Yet speaking the truth can expose us to criticism and judgment, and most of all to our own fears about the nature of our desires. Admitting who we are and what we want, recognizing our dependence and gratitude, puts us in a vulnerable position. We learn that human strengths and abilities are always limited by weakness, tiredness, forgetfulness, bad habits, and other imperfections. These innate limitations awaken us to the ways we need others and compel us to appreciate how we are helped and sustained by our relationships. Hiding from the truth leads only to the opposite: anxious self-protectiveness, isolation, fear, and shame.

Hiding in the Woods

ALL o F US STRUGGLE with shame, hiding ourselves and our needs because they seem to be wrong or bad. Diana's eating disorder was at its worst during the time she felt shamed by the rejection of her husband in favor of his mistress. Unconsciously she attempted to control those feelings by obsessively

controlling her body, appearing to be slender while consuming huge amounts of food. She hid from herself and the world the ways in which she felt empty and hungry, wanting to be filled by someone else^'s desire.

The woods where the Lady Ragnell lived as a hag can be understood as a symbol of shame—a place where we hide when we feel our identity or desires are bad. Although Ragnell does not express the feeling of shame, we can imagine that she lived a lonely, isolated life as the hag in the woods, awaiting a time when she could step forward. Women who identify with being the hag-bitch—the negatively powerful woman—almost always hide because they feel ashamed.

Shame is an emotion that expresses the desire to hide, disappear, or even die because we fear that the self is empty, bad, or inferior. When we are ashamed it feels as though nothing can be done about it, because shame is linked to a sense of being, not something that we're doing. If you believe you can-not do anything about feeling that there is something wrong with who you are, then it makes sense that you would try to protect yourself from being exposed. When we feel ashamed all kinds of deceits and lies arise in us to provide a protective cover.

When I think of Ragnell's woods as a symbol of shame, I think of women hiding in unsatisfactory, sometimes uncommitted, even cruel and abusive relationships. In such a shame-based environment, women are intimidated by name-calling, betrayal, threats of violence, and actual violence, which are often interpreted as indicating that something is terribly wrong with the women themselves. I also think of the more ordinary problem of a man who says to his female partner, "I just need more space, some time away from you so that I can get my thoughts together.^" This kind of statement implies that the woman sucks up the space between them, filling it with her overwhelming
24 WOMEN AND DESIRE Wanting to Be Wanted 25

When Cheryl began psychotherapy with me, she was thirty-three years old, single, very intelligent, well-educated, and working as a partner in a mostly male law firm in Philadel­phia. Of medium height, she weighed about 145 pounds and felt very ashamed of her weight and her body. Although she was muscular and healthy, she constantly felt that something was wrong with the way she looked. Cheryl was romantically involved with Brad, who was twenty-five, good-looking, energetic, less educated, and extremely noncommittal. They had been involved for about a year, and things were not going well. But Cheryl didn't want to talk about their relationship. She wanted to talk about herself, because she was afraid something was really wrong with her. As had Princess Diana, Cheryl was choosing men who eventually betrayed her, sexually or financially. Before Brad she had fallen for two other men who quickly professed love for her, promptly moved into her apartment, and soon began to take advantage of her high income and low self-esteem.

Cheryl wanted to get married and start a family but had no idea how to go about it. She did not want to ^"pressure^" Brad, who was still finishing college. In fact, she did not even want to speak about her desires to Brad, because she feared bringing up marriage and family would scare him away. Cheryl said she just wanted to appear to be ^"hanging out^" with Brad in a relaxed and open way so that he could see that she wasn't the type of woman to pressure him.

After Cheryl had been in therapy with me for about two years, living off and on with Brad, she finally confronted him: she was no longer willing to wait for him to make up his mind. She wanted him to commit to a long-term relationship, with marriage in tow, or she would move on. In spite of her forceful declaration, however, Cheryl was not fully convinced of her worth and attractiveness. Undermined by feelings of shame about her body and afraid that no man would choose her, Cheryl blurted out complaints and blame. She said she was "disgusted^" that Brad had stayed with her for so many years without making any promises about their future. Instead of speaking responsibly, she blamed Brad for making her feel so bad about herself. Her feelings of shame had kept her in the woods too long.

Unconsciously Cheryl acted out Brad's worst image of the hag-bitch: the power-hungry monster who cannot be satisfied. This fantasy of the dangerous hag depends on the belief that her demands and desires are endless, voracious, consuming. When women identify with shame, they believe that they are empty or worthless and turn to others to fill them up with supports and reassurances. As long as shame is primary in a woman's identity, nothing will fill the void; shame is like a vacuum or black hole that cannot hold the compliments and reassurances that are offered.

Cheryl gave Brad two weeks to make up his mind, but Brad turned her down after two days. Naturally, Cheryl was angry, bereft, and somewhat inclined to blame me and her therapy for compelling her to speak directly and "spoil" her relationship. Gradually, Cheryl and I examined the beliefs and fantasies that linked her to the feeling of shame. We discovered why she had been attracted to so many elusive and irresponsible men over

As we went through this process, Cheryl learned more about her psychological complexes, the name Carl Jung gave to the emotional tendencies we all have to protect ourselves in the same ways we did in childhood, to imagine a world that is filled with the dangers we sensed and encountered in our original families. These complexes are unconscious and semi-conscious tendencies to act out emotional dramas that may or may not be known to us, fueled by habits acquired in our dependency bonds from infancy and childhood, with parents and siblings.

When Cheryl faced Brad directly with her desires, she feared he would say she was not physically attractive to him. She also feared he would blame her for being unfair to him, for wanting too much, despite the fact that she had been endlessly fair and generous. This made sense only when we discovered that Cheryl had been both attracted to and intimidated by her unpredictable father when she was a child. A charming Bad Boy, her father was also a prominent lawyer who was outwardly respected by the community. He was a ^"street angel^" and a "house devil," as Cheryl put it. A womanizer, Cheryl^'s father humiliated his wife and blamed her for his failure to feel love for her after the first years of their marriage.

Cheryl witnessed many fights between her parents but felt more critical of her mother's passivity than of her father's accusations. Cheryl wanted her mother to stand up to her father and claim her own worth. Cheryl determined that she would win her father's love and praise by emulating him. She sought his approval by excelling at school in the subjects he loved and by developing a social charm that matched his. She won his

admiration and interest to such an extent that eventually she felt as though her father^'s responses to her, his love and praise, were under her control. If he failed to notice her or remark on an accomplishment, she would believe that she must be at fault. Her "power^" over him was that of the Object of Desire; she imagined that she controlled him through her actions, image, and accomplishments. This was the father complex that Cheryl re-created with Brad and her other lovers: unconsciously she wanted to be the exclusive Object of Desire, the longed-for companion who would perfectly meet the needs of the man.

Her energies would first be directed to making the man feel good about himself and at home in her life. Then she would seek to be approved and admired for her intelligence and attractiveness. Because she felt ashamed of her body, Cheryl believed that she had to work extra hard at being accommodating and pleasing, so that her partner would remain physically attracted to her. When her partner^'s interest seemed to wane, Cheryl would try to do something special—to make a particularly good meal or give a nice gift—in order to keep him involved.

Psychological complexes compel us, as they compelled Cheryl, to repeat the emotional themes from childhood, especially in our adult partnerships and parenting. Unless we become conscious of these complexes, they rule us through subjective impulses and images that seem to be reality. Complexes are the psychological karma that we bring with us from our families of origin. We came by them honestly, when we were dependent on others for survival and sustenance. They are triggered in our adult lives not only by certain emotional meanings but also by any stimuli—sounds, tastes, touch, smells, physical states (such as nausea)—familiar from the original contexts that endangered or overstimulated us.

28 WOMEN AND DESIRE Wanting to Be Wanted 29

When our complexes are hidden from our awareness, they can become monstrous, dampening our vitality and motivation. The experience of pervasive discontent and a futile kind of inner emptiness are symptoms of hidden complexes in their uglier forms. Unacknowledged longings and fears manifest themselves as strong drives that may appear in dreams and fantasies as demons, snakes, floods, earthquakes, threatening intruders, or hungry ghosts who could consume us. They may appear in waking life as addictions and compulsions that make no logical sense. Indeed, one way to interpret the monstrous hag hiding in the woods is as women^'s unconscious complex of female power that can be civilized and refined only when it is listened to, examined, and brought out into the light of day.

So Cheryl discovered what had bound her to irresponsible men: she was attracted to men like her father, whom she then idealized and tried to please, failing to notice where they were limited, wrong, or even bad. She would take all the responsibility for what went wrong in the relationships and increase her shame, believing that something was fundamentally wrong with her while overlooking the failures and mistakes of her partners.

Today, some five years later, Cheryl is married to a man very different from Daddy. He is a successful lawyer, like Cheryl and her father, but he and Cheryl have a relationship of mutual involvement and friendship. Together they work as professional mediators in divorce and separation cases. Cheryl now teaches other women and men to speak the truth in the con-text of respect and fairness.

Cheryl's loss of Brad opened the way for a new develop­ment. She learned the lesson that Ragnell hints at when she

says to Arthur, "I did not ask you to give me the knight Gawain. If Gawain agrees to marry me of his own free will . . ." This is the lesson of knowing the boundaries and limitations of your desire and power. When you learn to speak the truth, you come to recognize that you have no special power over others to make them do your bidding. You cannot pressure or scare away others by speaking your desires. Other adults also have free will. We all have a responsibility to speak our own desires and to respect those of others. When you speak the truth directly, you come to know the possibilities and limitations of being the Subject of Desire. For women this means overcoming our fears of being seen as the hag-bitch in order to say clearly and fully what we want without either demanding that we get it or believing that we have taken control of another.

The Subject of Desire

EITHER BECAUSE OF ignorance of the actual meaning of self-determination or because of the magic spell cast by wanting to be wanted, we women often misunderstand or forget that our deepest desire is for sovereignty over our own lives, the right and responsibility to act with free will—to be the Subjects of our own desires. This is true of all human beings, no matter their condition. It is only within the framework of such personal sovereignty that the kinder face of desire can shine and develop, through the responsibility and self-determination to live in a compassionate, conscious manner.

Being the Subject of your desires means not just asserting what you want but taking responsibility for your desires as well. These are closely related but different issues. Whereas being assertive means clearly stating your own needs and desires,

"So what did you say after he said that?^" I ask calmly. The most frequent answer is ^"Nothing. The conversation was over because he just doesn't get it. I have nothing more to say.^" The speaker has put the responsibility on the listener to take the conversation forward, but the speaker is the person with the desire. To responsibly handle such a problem, the speaker should continue to communicate her desire.

Being responsible means trying again and again in different ways to say what you want, until it can be heard and under-stood. If you are trapped in a psychological complex, in feeling that (for example) you are never heard or understood, then you will have to develop a great deal of patience and tolerance in order to take responsibility for your desire and not blame another for failing you before you have fully tried. This toler­ance is like a meditative discipline in conversation—breathe deeply and calmly return to the subject at hand. Like Ragnell, be confident that you can speak from your knowledge of your-self. If all else fails, simply and sincerely say something like ^"Those are my needs (or conditions), and when you are ready to talk about them, please let me know."

Being the Subjects of our desires means taking on the challenging, nuanced experience of learning who we are, charting the many layers of our subjective lives, and being accountable for them. Through this process we come to know how we are

limited by conditions and happenings beyond our control. As we take responsibility for our own desires, we discover how much we depend on others, and how often we may be mistaken or wrong in wanting certain things. The tolerance we develop for our own mistakes and blind spots spreads out to being toler­ant of shortcomings in others, especially those we love.

So how can we claim the validity of our desires without fear of repercussions and shame? How can we use our desires to attain self-knowledge and self-determination, to take responsibility for ourselves and become more authentic in our relations to others? Can we reach a place where our desires no longer drive us and we are content?

Ragnell^'s story provides us with some preliminary clues, and Diana^'s death is a cautionary tale. Wanting to be wanted is often a completely hidden desire, confused with wanting to be loved. In order to avoid the temptation to become the Object of Desire, we have to learn to oppose our tendencies to present an image. We must actively claim what we want, even if doing so puts us at risk of being labeled as the hag-bitch. With a confidence in our knowledge, we can firmly and calmly show that we don't fear female desire, that we want to be free from the dominance of appearance and its false power. Until women refuse to live by the belief that female power is beauty, we will be unable to reach the next level of our development, an ability to know and sustain our own truths in all domains of our existence.

The Truth of Being Known

TRUTH I S A WAY OF LIFE, not something that exists out-side ourselves. It's being honest and direct and transparent, as well as wholly respectful of those we depend on to sustain us. If