Female Roles In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight

Although there are not very many female characters in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or any of the other literature discussed this semester, the small roles the females play impact Gawain‘s quest throughout the story. There are three main females in this story; Queen Guinevere, the young lady and the old lady. Guinevere is the queen of Gawain‘s castle and she is important to him but she does not have a very much interaction with him before his journey. The second two ladies he meets at the castle he stops at on his way to the battle and they have more of an impact on him and they change the direction of the path he was headed down. The young lady impacts his journey much more directly than the older lady does but these three ladies all have an impact on him. For the most part, their interactions with him cause trouble for him and doom him along the way.
When the two ladies at the Lords castle are introduced, we can see they are very different. Gawain describes the lords lady as so young, fresh, elegantly dressed and even ‘‘more beautiful than Guinevere” (Winny ,53), this is the first bad sign because Gawain should never admit someone
Even though these may have been very subtle or very obvious interactions, they all impacted his journey in some way. During this period in history, women usually had very little significance to anything that would happen, but these three women had a very significant impact on his quest. The results of the interactions with any of these female characters never turned out well and always seemed to cause trouble for Sir Gawain in the end. Whether these interactions were indirect or direct it seemed the female characters had all doomed him in some way and put a barrier on his success. These female characters did have some small contributions to his