As I leafed through Han Kang’s The Vegetarian for the first time, amidst innumerable feelings that the book left me with was one that I could not identify. The feeling subsided. When I picked up Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin almost a year later, the feeling persisted. Such was the case with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, by Cho Nam-Joo.
There was an evident pattern―experiences of female characters culminating in a pang of emotions, a silent thud that echoed―it was the exposition of feminine rage that consumed me in these selected Korean contemporary novels. As the narratives of each u♊nfolded slowly, thᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚe underlying voices of the female characters descended into self-destructive violence inflicted by the society in different ways.
The feminine rage that authors such as Han Kang, Cho Nam-Joo and Kyung-Sook Shin employ curdles over time in a novel, as if there is something inexplicable not to be read through the words but soaked in them. They examine pain and the place of it in the world. Unlike the paragon of happiness and fulfilling K-dramas, o♍r the witty cinematics of꧑ K-movies, explores a different eerie yet profound alley altogether.
The Vegetarian, most celebrated novel of the recent Nobel laureate, Han Kang, is a pressing account of resistance and how many shapes it can take. Written delicately in three divisions, it delves into the consequences from society when Yeong-hye acts out of society’s convenient expectations. It begins with the perspective of Yeong-hye’s husband, where he reacts to her sudden choice of adopting vegetarianism. This segment drops questions of social morality and the ultimate ‘discomfort’ amongst relatives. The second part of the novel depicts a kind of violence that transcends physicality, from the point of view of her brother-in-law, it follows her violation under the guise of desire, obsession and art. The third part discovers Yeong-hye identifying as a tree, entering a state where worldly measures of resistance no longer remain effective. She slowly descends into madness, a kind of psychosis by severing ties to the world around her. Han Kang writes for pain’s posterity. Refusing to eat meat in the novel symbolises rejecting human brutality, and the end of the novel explai🙈ns the extent of it.
The notion of violence and war was associated with military and men in South Korea, it became a masculine entity of its own. However, violence is not a gendered territory. The violence that is infl﷽icted upon humans is more than mere physical. Kang and the women in literature create a battlefield that conspicuously places violence that is more feminine―the internal territory of rage that women occupy.
It is in the slowness of the narrative that the rage travels through the pages. Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin is about Oh San, a vulnerable woman who moves to Seoul for work, seeking her senꦦse of self and ends up in a cacophony of her surroundings and people. Her repression roots from neglect, her invisibility in the world. Shin incorporates the image of violet, the small flowers creeping on the sidewalks in Oh San. She works in a flower shop and finds purpose in tending to flowers. The sudden visitor in t⛦he flower shop imperiously sexualises her, violating her sense of self. The photographer who swoons over her at a company dinner one night has no recollection of her identity. She is left abandoned by such unforgiving instances where her helplessness ultimately oozes rage out of her.
‘Her resistance doesn♒’t leave the slightest damage’, writes Shin when every inch of Oh San retaliates for all🃏 kinds of the violence inflicted on her, but it seldom creates a difference. Rage projects itself when resistance is not enough.
The man, or the world dominated by men have destroyed her, so they destroy themselves as a notion of regaining their belongingness even if it comes at the cost of living. Deborah Smith hints at this hysteria in Cost of Living, ‘when a woma𒁏n has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has ceased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse.’ Hysteria declares a woman verging on insanity, but it backfires on her identity.
There is a word in Korean that converges anger (han) and melancholy, Hwabyeong—a state of mental distress caused by repressed feelings and lack of confrontation to anger after being unfairly treated. Different than what hysteria connotes, it is culturally and consciously representative of women. It largely somatises middle-aged Korean women who have endured the patriarchal structure and goes on to affect them physically as palpitations, burning in chest, hallucinations, insomnia and depression. The characters Yeong-hye and Oh San conveniently possess the symptoms of Hwabyeong. When their anger founds no outlet, it resorts to an i𒅌nternal explosion affecting their external bei🍬ng. They protest for their rage to be treated right.
Korean traditions are rooted in the Confuci💝an canon, directly affecting the gender landscape of the country. It upheld the inferiority of women over men, which resulted in domestic suppression, economic inequality and subservience to generational patriarchy. Along with🌌 the surge of #MeToo movement. It ultimately led women writers to dissent through writing, breaking the Confucian mindset.
Through writing, they created a space to relocate their identity on a larger social scale, and compelling women to introspect. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo reads like a conflicted yet normalised life of a woman and𒁃 her generations, living compromisingly under the tenet of being a wife, mother, daughter, employee and a woman. Slowly and definitively, Kim Jiyoung descends intᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚo indifference and insanity as society decides her femininity for her. Somewhere in the middle of the novel, her grandma guards the new born formula for the grandson, directing that it belongs to him and not her granddaughters. In a society where rituals are prejudiced and biased, women like Jiyoung become crucial to celebrate not as a victim, but as a survivor.
In all the three novels, society irks at the idea of a woman— when Oh San is born as a female, when Yeong-hye takes up the role of a wife, and when Kim Jiyoung simply exists as a woman, as every woman. Korean gender roles align to Indian readers. The rise of Korean literature in India can be credited to the surge of Hallyu, but it resonated for𒊎 the cultural and social similarities.
Credit to the translators Jamie Chang for Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Anton Hur for Violets and Deborah Smith for The Vegetarian for transcending the barrier of languag♌e and weaving each novel into a story as original as the characters’ silences and sighs. To delve into Korean literature, women writers claim the space to treat the readers right.
(Manasha Sharma is an independent writer)
