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AFTER MANY FALSE STARTS I began to wonder why I found it so difficult to set down my thoughts about this story. I gradually realized that unlike many legends that have clear "psycho-symbolic" relevance, this one did not resonate for me. If anything, it jarred. It would seem obvious to view the tale as an answer to that troublesome question, "What do women want?" However, I find it too problematic to interpret it in that light. After all, the major focus and cast of characters are questing men. Moreover, what woman could say that there is any one thing she most desires in the world, any one motivation for her complex and sometimes contradictory urges? How well could one woman's answer possibly speak for all women, much less "Woman?"
The problem became clearer as I asked myself whose voice was represented, who was the poet/storyteller and what did the story tell us about her or him? Even more fundamentally, was the "author" writing from a feminine or a masculine orientation? (I think this is a valid question, while of course the actual gender of the raconteur/narrator is unknowable, and perhaps immaterial). To what extent was this tale the product of the female psyche, and to what extent of the male psyche?
In response to these musings, my answer was that the tale seemed to me to be a reflection of a masculine sensibility more than a feminine one. One could even say that from one perspective, it is the story of the male's sincere attempt to try to understand what moves women to be as they are and to behave as they do.
The sociolinguist Deborah Tannen (1990) makes the case that women communicate in order to establish connectedness or relatedness, while men communicate primarily to establish their position in a power/status hierarchy. (Though stereotypic and certainly rather simplistic, her point is backed up with ample empirical observations and data of females and males from childhood through adulthood.) The Gawain/Ragnell parable is preeminently about cross-