What are your thoughts on Olivia marrying Sebastian in Twelfth Night?
My thoughts on this subject are far from simple, because it’s a question that’s tied up with my understanding of the play as a whole and with the way the play presents desire.
The first thing to note is that Shakespeare takes great pains to establish just how alike the twins are. Viola’s identity is strongly bound up in Sebastian (which I believe has to do with the metaphysics of twinship). When she arrives on the coast of Illyria, Viola has no idea what her life is worth anymore: ‘And what should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium’ (1.2.2-3), and although it isn’t clear from the beginning, Viola later makes it clear that her disguise as ‘Cesario’ is based on her brother Sebastian:
I my brother knowYet living in my glass. Even such and soIn favour was my brother, and he wentStill in this fashion, colour, ornament,For him I imitate. (3.3.346-50)
Viola actively copies her brother in manner and in dress, right down to the details. So ‘Cesario’ lies somewhere in between ‘Viola’ and ‘Sebastian’, it’s not a straightforward persona of Viola, and this is reaffirmed by Sebastian when he finally comes face-to-face with Viola
Do I stand there? I never had a brother,Nor can there be that deity in my natureOf here and everywhere. (5.1.224-6)
He recognises this other creature as an ‘I’, as himself. His closeness and his paired identity with Viola is confirmed at the end, when Sebastian says to Olivia ‘You are betrothed both to a man and maid’ (5.1.257), which, on a literal level means that she’s married to a virgin male, but suggests that in marrying Sebastian, Olivia marries someone who is at least partly Viola himself.
Having said that, the ending isn’t necessarily comfortable, because it doesn’t resolve all of the sexual confusion that the play has raised. One way of viewing the paring off at the end is to say that the play affirms a sense of heteronormativity, some critics would even say that the play positions same-sex desire as a narcissistic phase that the characters overcome at the end. Another way of reading it is that the play reasserts dramatic conventions to impose an ending onto an otherwise complicated plot.
But Shakespeare is never so uncomplicated. I always think that any sense of discord or discomfort at the end is deliberate, especially considering how Shakespeare’s comedies become problem plays later in his life. Just like As You Like It, where the comedic ending is made patently transparent through the use of the Deus ex Machina tradition and the all-too-convenient marriages, I think that the ending of Twelfth Night highlights the artificial nature of comedy endings and how there is no resolution to the complications raised by uncategorizable sexual desire and the fluidity of gender. After all, even heteronormativity is up in the air at the end, where Orsino continues to call Viola ‘boy’ (5.1.261) and says ‘Cesario come – / For so you shall be while you are a man’ (5.1.375-6); suggesting that his love for Cesario isn’t actually dependent on gender.
I have no straightforward answer to this question because my feelings about the marriage of Olivia and Sebastian are ambiguous at best. To some extent it reveals something about identity and twinship, in another way it won’t resolve the problem that Olivia was wooed by ‘Cesario’, who also contains in him Viola’s femininity and understanding of feminine desire. But I do think that the marriage is not necessarily a way of resolving these contradictions; if anything, it continues to raise problems about finality and normalcy.
