Abstract

Han Kang's 2007 novel The Vegetarian, published in English translation in 2015, tells a story of one woman's refusal to eat meat. Yeong-hye's refusal comes from her desire to eschew the intersecting violence of patriarchy and carnism, which gradually reveals an underlying psychosis and drive towards self-attrition. Because of the central motifs of bodily transgression and self-abnegation in the novel, critics have compered Han Kang's Yeong-hye to Frantz Kafka's Gregor Samsa or the hunger artist. Just as the hunger artist seeks seclusion from human sociality in the space of his vacuous interiority, so does Yeong-hye sequester herself from the gaze of others in her visions of...