By Gizem Damla Çakmak, Sabancı University
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (first published in South Korea in 2007 and translated into English in 2015) tells the story of a young woman named Yeong-hye who decides to turn vegetarian after having dreadful and blood-soaked nightmares about eating meat, which gradually leads to her isolation from her traditional patriarchal family and deeply conservative South Korean society she lives in. Yeong-hye is voiceless throughout the novel and the story is narrated in turns; in the voices of her husband Mr. Cheong, her artist brother-in-law and her sister In-hye. Her voice is heard only a handful of times in the novel when she gives short answers to the questions posed to her by her husband and other family members and when she gives vivid descriptions of her dreams written in italics.
The novel is infused with various elements of the ecoGothic, intertwined with other structures of oppression, which is always ecophobic (Estok, 2019: p. 48). Yeong-hye challenges both anthropocentric and androcentric norms through vegetarianism as her dietary choice. In such a flesh-eating society as South Korea, she stops eating meat and dairy products and in the latter parts of the novel refuses to consume any kind of food except drink water. She also starts to suffer from insomnia. She loses weight and becomes thinner day by day. She does not engage in any meaningful communication with those around her.
Her decaying body and mental state in the novel foregrounds the Gothic preoccupation with decay and unpredictability which triggers loathing, a quality that might be characterised as ecophobic (Estok, 2019). Just as the nature in its inscrutability constitutes ‘a space of representational crisis’ in the Gothic from which emanates ecophobic anxieties about control (Keetley and Sivils, 2018: p. 3), Yeong-hye’s dietary choices and incommunicability evoke dread in her family members and in society. This dread in turn leads to resentment and contempt and consequent physical violence because of her defiance of male authority.
Lack of control is central to the ecoGothic (Keetley and Sivils, 2018) and stands at the intersection of ecophobia and sexism. While dining in a restaurant with her husband’s boss, two directors and their wives, Yeong-hye faces the others’ contemptuous gaze due to her not wearing a bra and her opting for vegetarianism as a dietary choice. The executive director’s wife sarcastically asks Yeong-hye: ‘A balanced diet goes hand in hand with a balanced mind, don’t you think?’ (Kang, 2015: p. 23). At a housewarming party at her sister’s new apartment, Yeong-hye’s father, a patriarchal figure who served as a military veteran in Vietnam, strikes her in the face and force-feeds her meat. He tells his son Yeong-ho and Yeong-hye’s husband Mr. Cheong to hold her still and then jams a piece of pork in her mouth. She spits out the meat. In protest of her father’s treatment, she only growls and moans. She does not speak. As her brother-in-law describes it: ‘An animal cry of distress burst from her lips.’ (Kang, 2015: p. 40). After this incident, she grabs a fruit knife, cuts her wrist and then becomes hospitalised. This self-imposed starvation and her individual and deliberate choice to stop speaking become pathologised as unnatural and a mental disorder. Abandoned by her husband and family, she is sent to a psychiatric hospital towards the end of the novel where she is occasionally visited by her sister In-hye, her only point of contact with the outside world. Her father’s efforts to force-feed her and control her eating habits cast a gothic light on the link between the praxis of meat-eating and masculinity (Adams, 2015), which fosters a culture of violence oppressing both women and non-human animals. Through her individual and deliberate choice to stop speaking and meat-eating, Yeong-hye disrupts hegemonic masculinity, which subjects the female body to a cultural imperative intent on controlling women’s bodies, choices and sexuality. She frees herself from the grip of patriarchal ideology.
Following Lacan’s (1982) theorisation of subject formation, to enter into language is to assume a subject position and hence subject the self to the law of the father. Lacan states that it is through signification that subjects acquire their identities based on sexual difference. Differentiation from the maternal body marks out an identification with a subject position within the symbolic order. Subjectivity is produced in constraint as one abandons incestuous desires for the mother and submits to the law of the father. Lacan posits incest taboo as central to the acquisition of cultural identity, which is predicated upon the relegation of the maternal body to a precultural realm. His conception of incest taboo represents a threshold between nature and culture.
Lacan understands the body as an imaginary formation whose integrity can be sustained through submission to the language, which installs the phallus as the privileged signifier within the Symbolic. The subject’s position in language is defined in relation to either being or having the phallus, which he prospectively associates with femininity as representing lack and masculinity as possessing the object of desire. For him, the formation of an imaginary body in what he calls the ‘mirror stage’ and the assumption of sexed identity in language constitute two key moments in the formation of a child’s ego. He presents the mirror stage as that which marks ‘the genesis of bodily boundaries’ (Butler, 2011: p. 40). In so doing, he prioritises the infant’s identification with unified and idealized image of him/herself in the mirror in the constitution of subjectivity and effaces the maternal body as the pre-discursive site of identification.
Source: http://www.tamaradean.com.au/works/instinctual-2017/
Deconstructionist feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous put Lacanian psychoanalysis to the use of feminist theories and criticise Lacan’s one-sex model of sexuality and subjectivity centred upon the male anatomy. Irigaray employs deconstructionism as a critical tool to unveil phallogocentric practices privileging sight, unity and totality and the mechanism by which the feminine is excluded from philosophical discourse as an autonomous subject. For Irigaray, sexual difference is assigned in language and how we understand our biology is culturally influenced, a proposition that she shares with Lacan. However, she criticises the relegation of subjectivity to the realm of masculinity. Irigaray combines the insights of psychoanalysis and linguistic theory to examine the way in which the feminine is effaced from the symbolic discourse. She renegotiates feminine subjectivity and its connection to enunciation, a term which refers to the linguistic processes underlying the production of statements (Bainbridge, 2008). Irigaray employs critical linguistic tools to demonstrate the constitution of the feminine as excess and plurality by reworking notions of masquerade and mimesis. Mimicry, for Irigaray, opens a space for women to experience their own desires predicated upon the deliberate assumption of a feminine role:
To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit her-self – inasmuch as she is on the side of “perceptible,” of “matter”- to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. (Irigaray, 1985: p. 76)
In the car park of the restaurant where she and her husband dine with his directors and their wives, Mr. Cheong watches Yeong-hye as she stands in the cold chilling and he thinks to himself, ‘[t]here’s nothing wrong with keeping quiet; after all, hadn’t women traditionally been expected to be demure and restrained?’ (Kang, 2015: p, 21). During the dinner, Yeong-hye does not speak most of the time and it is her husband who answers the questions directed to her by others on behalf of her. She also does not wear bra. When asked why she stopped eating meat, ‘I had a dream’ she replies (Kang, 2015: p, 24). Her utterances, having no proper meaning, are difficult to read by others. To quote Irigaray:
Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. For in what she says, too, at least when she dares, woman is constantly touching herself (Irigaray, 1985: p. 29).
Through her silence and bodily gestures, Yeong-hye deliberately takes on the feminine role ascribed to her by a masculine logic and disrupts the discursive coherence in the phallogocentric symbolic order. Through a mimetic engagement with the construction of the feminine as ‘lack’ and the Other signifier of the signifying chain, Yeong-hye reclaims her body and sexuality and establish a discursive subjectivity from her marginalised and underrepresented position in phallogocentric philosophical discourse.
Source: http://www.tamaradean.com.au/works/in-our-nature-2018/
As she expunges herself from this domain of signification, Yeong-hye starts to navigate the territory of the liminal. Though she adamantly wishes to become a plant and gradually merge with the vegetal, she is neither human nor animal or plant. She is cast out as a loathed monstrous, abject figure whose ontological liminality provokes a categorical and epistemological crisis among her closest social circle. She becomes a threat to the established identity system, a disposable target of gendered violence and ‘the object of ecophobic fury,’ to use Estok’s (2009) terms.
By the time she stops eating meat, she also starts to actively avoid sex with her husband. Yeong-hye shows a strong sexual aversion to her husband’s body because he consumes meat. As her husband Mr. Cheong inquires the reasons for her avoidance of sex, she replies: ‘Your body smells of meat.’ When he insistently asks about the source of the smell, Yeong-hye solemnly answers: ‘From the same place your sweat comes from’ (Kang, 2015: p. 17). The words spilling from her mouth exemplify the capacity of the novel to evoke and foreground ecoGothic fears of the return of the animal, the alterity within, expunged for the self to emerge as corporeally bounded body housing a properly constituted psyche. In this respect, Kang uses the ecoGothic imaginary to draw attention to carnivorous sacrifice as central to the constitution of subjectivity (Derrida, 1992) and to the interplay of meat eating and masculinity (Adams, 2015).
The Vegetarian can be read as registering ecophobic fears and anxieties about the possible violation of the boundaries of the human body by the nonhuman, introducing the threat of the imbrication of the sentient with insentient, but also as opening space for queer sexual possibilities. Yeong-hye’s artist brother-in-law asks her to model for him and films her and his friend J’s naked bodies covered in painted-on flowers in a rented studio. After he finishes filming them, Yeong-hye starts to giggle. As her brother-in-law asks her why she laughs, ‘Because I’m all wet,’ she replies (Kang, 2015: p. 106). She tells him she gets wet not because she fancied J, but because she was sexually aroused by the sight of flowers painted on his body. As sentience is posited as the border separating human from nonhuman in canonical Western philosophy – hence privileging an anthropocentric ontology, in casting such union as a possibility – the novel frustrates normative expectations regarding what constitutes desire and sexuality. By employing an ecoGothic imagination, the text shifts the focus from the human body taken, from an anthropocentric gaze, as a privileged locus of sexuality to a broader definition of sexual desire as flowers painted on a body is invested with a capacity to stimulate and produce sexual arousal in another body that they relate to.
Source: http://www.tamaradean.com.au/works/in-our-nature-2018/
Works Cited
Adams, C. J. (2015). The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. USA, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Bainbridge, C. (2008) A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film. Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan.
Butler, J. (2011) Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York, Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1992) Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In: Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M. & Carlson, D. G. (eds) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge, pp. 3-68.
Estok, S. C. (2019) Theorising the EcoGothic. Gothic Nature. 1, 34-54. Available from: https://gothicnaturejournal.com. [Accessed 15th December 2020].
—— (2009) Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 16 (2), 203-225.
Irigaray, L. (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by C. Porter and C. Burke. New York: Cornell University Press.
Jacques, L. (1982) The Meaning of the Phallus. In: Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (eds) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan & the École Freudienne. London: Macmillan Press, pp. 74–85.
Kang, H. (2015). The Vegetarian. Translated by D. Smith. London: Portobello Books.
Keetley, D. & Sivils, M. W. (2018) Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic. In:
Keetley, D. & Sivils, M. W. (eds) Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature. New York, Routledge, pp. 1-21.
Author Biography:
Gizem Damla Çakmak is a PhD student in the program of Gender Studies at Sabancı University, Turkey. Her research lays at the intersection of queer theory, ecocriticism and speculative fiction and Gothic literature.