In King Arthur’s Enchantresses (2006), Carolyne Larrington, Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, describes enchantresses as “an interesting tangent to the courtly world, challenging or unsettling its norms, making opportunities for other voices, particularly those of women, to be heard above the clash of lance against armour and the thunderous sound of charging hooves.” The enchantresses—femme and feminine figures with magical powers, such as witches, faeries, and sorceresses—are continually reimagined and reconstructed, reflecting important truths about society’s deepest desires, fears, or anxieties with each rebirth. For example, the Salem Witch Trials and the widespread paranoia and fear surrounding witches were both a result and a reflection of patriarchal society, religious oppression, and the puritanical desire for conformity in 17th century Salem. However, witches have since then re-emerged and been reimagined in popular media transcending both time and culture: being represented as beautiful, benevolent figures such as Glinda the Good Witch in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and subsequent media—such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Wicked (2024)—or as protagonists in mahou shoujo (“magical girl”) works, a popular subgenre of Japanese fantasy media.

Inspired by Geraldine Heng’s argument for Morgan le Fay as a character who influences the central narrative from the margins of Arthuriana, I argue using methodologies such as close reading, character study, and feminism, that in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, magic and femininity are two forces in interplay that define the “marginal” Lady of the Lake, who in turn, through her magic and femininity, influences and shapes the crux of the central narrative. Thus, despite the marginalization of the Lady and other feminine figures, the entanglement and inseparability of femininity and magic in Le Morte D'Arthur reveals the Lady of the Lake as a crucial, central character.