Toward a Blue Gender Studies: The Sea, Diana, and Feminine Virtue in Pericles

This original article responds to recent ecocritical trends in Shakespeare studies, namely what literary critic Steve Mentz has called the “blue humanities”, or the critical analysis of literary motifs that embed the human subject within a precarious, sea-tossed imaginary. In its efforts to explore the benthic depths of Shakespeare, however, this essay demonstrates that the “blue” in Shakespeare studies has elided a crucial aspect of Shakespearean imagination: gender and female agency. “Toward a Blue Gender Studies” thus investigates Shakespeare’s play Pericles—an offbeat romance he co‑wrote with George Wilkins—to show how the sea’s propensity for rape and sexual violence is restrained by the hidden powers that the goddess Diana wields. While scholars have studied Diana’s role in Pericles as protectress of mothers in childbirth, I shift the critical conversation to her other powerful sphere of influence: the moon. To call attention to Diana’s occulted power throughout the play, I investigate post‑Copernican astronomy and the lively debates theorizing the moon’s sway over tidal behaviors on Earth’s oceans. By engaging with ecofeminist critique and the history of science, my literary analysis brings to light the lengthy, gendered literary history between Diana as moon-deity and Neptune, the sea‑god. As a result, this work proffers a renewed study of the “blue humanities”, making space for feminine virtue and influence while also attending to our critical concerns with the issues afflicting our current epoch: climate change, devastating storms, and rising sea levels.