“Behind her was the sweet smell of kitchen herbs and pot herbs, the still-room
herbs her father’s wife used to make medicines and simples.  The garden was one of her favorite places, perhaps the only outdoor place that Gwenhwyfar really liked.  She felt safer indoors, as a rule, or when enclosed--the walls around the kitchen garden made it nearly as safe as inside the castle.  Up here, on top of the wall, she could see out over the valley, and there was so much of it, stretching farther than the eye could see . . . Gwenhwyfar turned her look back to the safety of the garden for a moment for her hands were beginning to tingle with the numbness again, and her breath felt tight in her throat. Here, right on the very wall which enclosed her own garden it was safe; if she began to feel the strangling panic again she could turn and slide down the wall and be safe again inside the garden.” (251)

 This is such a great passage, and it really sums up Gwenhwyfar’s entire life and
personality in a few lines.  Symbolically, here she sits on the wall between the secure Christian control, and the wide open spaces of sin and Lancelot’s love.  She also represents the kind of person that Bradley believes to be good Christian woman material, a person who thrives on entrapment.
 
 
  Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon.  Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.