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WOMEN, DAME RAGNELL SAYS, IN the King Arthur tale, want power over men. The story supports her opinion; power and
domination run through the plot. King Arthur's actual survival depends on coming up with the right answer to the question "What is it that a woman most desires in the world?" When eventually the dame meets the King she can tell him, condescendingly, "If I help thee not, thou art but dead." If a commoner, and a hideous hag at that, can patronize a King so casually, women must not only desire, but actually have the power of life and death. And of course she gets her way; Arthur surrenders to her the noble and loyal Sir Gawain.
But things are not that simple. Eventually, we find out that Dame Ragnell was not born loathesome, and probably not power-mad either. She is less a fiend than a victim herself, struggling to overcome a spell cast on her by her stepmother. Her hunger for power is itself a part of the spell; she must remain hideous "until the best knight of England should wed her and yield the sovereignty of all his body and goods." So the message of the story is ambiguous. Perhaps women are power hungry villains who will stop at nothing to dominate a man. Or perhaps they are dominated by the evil machinations of others, so that their need for power is secondary to the need to survive. The question echoes through psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice even today.
The idea that women want to dominate men reflects a widely held belief that the desire for domination is a fundamental human motive.1 It is commonly assumed in popular culture, and in psychoanalytic theory as well, that those people who don't have power are seeking it and that those who have power use it to dominate others. Examples can be found in most societies, and even the animal