Yeong-hye, the woman at the center of Han Kang’s bewitching novel “The Vegetarian,” remains an enigma throughout. In the book’s first sentence, her husband dismisses her thus: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” One day she suddenly abstains from meat, refusing to cook it or keep it in the house. Her sole explanation to her annoyed husband: “I had a dream.”
Yeong-hye’s story is part feminist fable, part transformation story, part grisly fairy tale. It is told in three sections by characters other than herself. The first section (“The Vegetarian”) is narrated by her husband, Mr. Cheong, a self-acknowledged bully who values his wife for her perfect ordinariness. The second (“Mongolian Mark”) follows her brother-in-law, an artist who longs to cast her in an erotic video project. In the final section (“Flaming Trees”) her sister, In-hye, struggles to understand Yeong-hye as the latter slowly starves, believing herself to be turning into a tree. By making her focal character into a kind of tabula rasa, Han allows these characters – and by extension, the reader – to impose their own desires and concerns onto her opaque surface. The novel boldly challenges our conflicting impulses to objectify and sympathize as Yeong-hye progresses from defective wife, to erotic object, to abject figure on the brink of transcendence.
Han Kang originally published “The Vegetarian” in her native South Korea in 2007; it has been translated into English by Deborah Smith. The novel won Han and Smith the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for fiction.
The subject matter of “The Vegetarian” echoes that of Margaret Atwood’s 1969 novel “The Edible Woman,” about a young woman who becomes unable to eat meat, then gradually all food, as she feels herself being consumed by her impending engagement. Feminist themes can be easily extracted from both novels: women’s relationship to food as its traditional preparers, and as food themselves to be devoured by men; fasting as a rejection of femininity. (Characters repeatedly note the state of Yeong-hye’s breasts as she wastes away from starvation.)
But Han is after something darker and less obvious in “The Vegetarian.” Yeong-hye’s abstention from meat is only the first step in a larger rejection of humanity. One of her few intrusions into the narrative, an italicized stream of consciousness, recalls a gruesome childhood memory: A dog bites her, and her father lashes it to a motorcycle and rides in circles until it dies of exhaustion. The animal ends up in a soup. Later, the same father attempts to pry open his daughter’s mouth and force her to eat a piece of pork. Food is just one of many agents of cruelty and control that Yeong-hye sloughs in her transformation. “I’m not an animal anymore,” she tells her sister in a moment of quiet triumph. Han’s bleak vision of humanity is such that Yeong-hye’s journey inspires elation as well as pity and terror. It causes us to wonder who, given the choice, would want to be an animal anyway.
