Gender, Power and Oppression in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

The paper attempts to study the famous South Korean Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s breakthrough text The Vegetarian in association with gender based oppression. The aim of the paper is to study how the female protagonist of the text, Yeong-Hye is oppressed throughout the novel after making the decision to become a vegan. Kang divides the book into three sections while each of the sections is told from diverse individual perspectives. Each of the section eventually reveals how Yeong-Hye has been ill-treated by her family members after becoming a vegan. An in-depth analysis of the characters along with Yeong-Hye, highlights the manner in which various forms of discrimination crowd the universal reality of the text and intersect one another thereby creating a cluster of connections which is apparent in Yeon-Hye’s gradual mental breakdown. The incapacity of the people to accept her individual right as a human being to control and choose her food habit is unimaginable. The novel explores how a small decision of a woman on her food habit changes everyone’s attitude around her. There are many instances in the novel that highlight the simulation of the protagonist Yeong-Hye as she goes through mental breakdown thereby showcasing the blur of a fixed notion of female identity. The aim of this paper is to foreground those instances by making analytical observation on the journey of the protagonist from a vegan to a performative female position in which she resists the norms and is oppressed till the very end of the novel.

Key words: Female Identity, Gender, Oppression, Ecology, Veganism, Gender based Violence