Oceans, hormones and female flow in Twelfth Night

Although a shipwreck in Twelfth Night violently separates Viola from her twin, the catastrophe also shows Shakespeare’s audience that water is a tool which can assuage grief and allow Viola to hide herself while operating as an instrument for managing other women’s bodies and desires, too. Disguising herself as a eunuch allows Viola to dam up the flood of desire and halt growth, but these infrastructural adjustments to flow work on larger and smaller scales, reorganising the imagination while upending how the world is viewed. Power operates differently when water swamps thinking and Twelfth Night’s multiple references to things like ‘tears’, ‘brine’, ‘foam’, ‘waves’, and ‘storms’ help us see water as a symbol, resource and ordering device. If women’s bodies seem particularly defined and changed by watery flow, Viola’s story suggests how the same forces coursing through bodies work outside them, with water activating engines for industry, trade and empire. Drawing on oceanic studies, decolonial feminist theory, the biology of menstruation and early modern imperial thought, I analyse Twelfth Night as awash in ideas about the ways globalisation unfolds across ‘hungry’ seas and inside women’s bodies, with water’s hydraulics coordinating how, when and why people and empires might come together.