Soldiers, Merchants, and Artists: Tracking Multiple Axes of Patriarchy in The Vegetarian

In 1897, Paul Gauguin painted his magnum opus, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” 12 feet long and 4½ feet tall, the composition portrays generations of Tahitian women in varying states of undress. Female elders, adults, and children angle their nude bodies towards the viewer as they recline by fruit trees, inviting an objectifying comparison between the female Tahitian subject and fertile tropical fruit. In this ostensibly paradisiacal scene, though, what isn’t seen is also telling. To this day a semi-autonomous French territory, Tahiti has survived a legacy of extractive trade networks, including crops such as cotton, coffee, and vanilla, and extensive French military operation, from usurpation to garrisoning and, more recently, nuclear testing. Although considered a masterpiece of Post-Impressionist art, Gauguin’s painting belies horrifying colonial and capitalist violences–the brutal French oppression of Tahitian peoples through racialized, sexualized, and classist harm. Adjacent to Gauguin’s unnamed and effaced subjects, in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye resists artists, merchants, and soldiers alike as she enters a period of heightened vulnerability during her metamorphosis. Painted beautifully by Brother-In-Law, the physical, sexual, and social violences Yeong-hye experiences on account of her military Father and class-anxious husband are rendered invisible and even fetishized, the result of multiple forms of patriarchy conspiring to disguise and exacerbate Yeong-hye’s suffering.

Throughout the novel, Yeong-hye faces continual patriarchal violence from her family as she undergoes a disruptive metamorphosis from vegetarian to human-tree in order to prevent recurring, traumatic dreams. During her journey, most of the male figures in Yeong-hye’s life come to abuse and exploit her in different ways, starting with her husband Mr. Cheong, her Father, and eventually her Brother-In-Law. The reason Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is taken so harshly by her family is not because of her non-meat diet itself, but rather because Yeong-hye, in deciding to become vegetarian, acts on her own body with her own agency. Under the patriarchal configurations of late capitalist Korea, this autonomy is transgressive. Mr. Cheong admits so himself–despite being “aware that choosing a vegetarian diet wasn’t quite so rare as it had been in the past,” he disapproves of Yeong-hye’s choices, arguing that it is “sheer obstinacy for a wife to go against her husband’s wishes” (Han 15). The problem Mr. Cheong finds with Yeong-hye’s metamorphosis, then, is the suddenness and subversiveness of her change. Through the allegory of Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism, Han illustrates how metamorphosis can often be radical because it involves an autonomous change of the self without necessitating a change of environment. While Yeong-hye becomes vegetarian, Mr. Cheong and her family still wish to eat meat; it is this incongruence that alienates Yeong-hye and drives the conflict of the first chapter.

Yeong-hye’s Father is the most physically aggressive character in The Vegetarian. A proud Vietnam veteran, he represents the brute force violence of patriarchy, enforcing tradition and obedience by doling out bodily harm. Although having abused Yeong-hye throughout her childhood, it is not until Yeong-hye’s vegetarian metamorphosis that Father strikes her again.

Father-in-law mashed the pork to a pulp on my wife’s lips as she struggled in agony. Though he parted her lips with his strong fingers, he could do nothing about her clenched teeth. Eventually he flew into a passion again, and struck her in the face once more. (Han 28)

In this instant, it is important to note the power dynamics at play affecting Father and Yeong-hye. Although the scene takes place in In-hye and Brother-In-Law’s house, the reunion of the family reinstates Father as the dominant patriarch. Yeong-hye, on the other hand, is physically and socially vulnerable, weakened from “protracted insomnia” and shunned by various members of the family (Han 26). Disciplined by years of military service, Father finds Yeong-hye’s agency in spite of her subalternity to be unacceptable. Thus, he doesn’t hit Yeong-hye initially to force the pork into her mouth, but he rather attacks when she resists, when he learns that “he could do nothing about her clenched teeth” (Han 28). Again, it is not Yeong-hye’s diet, but her resistance against all odds that is subversive. Father’s blend of patriarchy, the patriarchy of soldiers, is perhaps the most simple–Father tries at first to verbally and socially force Yeong-hye to conform, but upon encountering her resolute will, he responds with violence.

Mr. Cheong, the first patriarch introduced in the novel, engages in a different kind of gendered violence–a commodification of Yeong-hye down to her purely sexualized body and appearance under capital, driven by Mr. Cheong’s own capitalist anxieties. Mr. Cheong’s pedantic narration of Yeong-hye’s appearance at the dinner event with his bosses illustrates this dynamic.

She was wearing a slightly clinging black blouse, and to my utter mortification I saw that the outline of her nipples was clearly visible through the fabric. Without a doubt, she’d come out without a bra. When the other guests surreptitiously craned their necks, no doubt wanting to be sure that they really were seeing what they thought they were, the eyes of the executive director’s wife met mine. Feigning composure, I registered the curiosity, astonishment, and contempt that were revealed in turn in her eyes. (Han 19)

As Mr. Cheong does not envision Yeong-hye as a being with agency, he takes personal responsibility for her taboo appearance. The progression of Mr. Cheong’s capitalist-patriarchal logic is apparent in the passage–”without a doubt,” Mr. Cheong faults Yeong-hye for not wearing a bra, and “without a doubt,” he imagines his superiors to deeply criticize Yeong-hye with “curiosity, astonishment, and contempt,” a criticism fundamentally marked by Mr. Cheong and his bosses’ class difference (Han 19). In particular, Mr. Cheong worries about Yeong-hye’s performance of femininity–the quality of her makeup and her lack of a bra (Han 18-19). In this manner, through the proxy of his superiors’ gaze, Mr. Cheong transfers his class insecurities at the dinner table into a gendered scrutiny of Yeong-hye’s body. Mr. Cheong’s patriarchy, the patriarchy of merchants, can thus be identified with an obsession over and objectification of the female body in relation to its sexuality and performance of gender under capitalism. It is this same capitalist-patriarchal logic which later justifies Mr. Cheong’s acts of sexual violence against Yeong-hye as he believes that Yeong-hye is in his debt for not behaving sexually or feminine in the home.

Throughout Yeong-hye’s struggles, Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law seems to be one of the few who tolerate her otherness. Compared to the other men in her family, Brother-In-Law seems benign and even helpful, carrying an injured Yeong-hye to the hospital after she attempts suicide (Han 30). But hidden behind his well-meaning veneer, Brother-In-Law succeeds Father and Mr. Cheong as an agent of patriarchy, traumatizing Yeong-hye with an insidious, patronizing violence. From Brother-In-Law’s perspective, Han limns a deep perversity.

The sight of her [Yeong-hye] lying there utterly without resistance, yet armored by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes. Her skinny collarbones; her breasts that, because she was lying on her back, were slender and elongated like those of a young girl; her visible ribcage; her parted thighs, their position incongruously unsexual; her face, still and swept clean, open eyes which could well have been asleep. (Han 53) 

Brother-In-Law’s intense descriptions of Yeong-hye reveal his deep obsession with Yeong-hye’s vulnerability, manifesting across multiple axes. Speaking purely in terms of the physical, Brother-In-Law is aroused by Yeong-hye’s skinniness and childlike features, two indicators of vulnerability broadly understood in both Western and non-Western cultures. Further, Brother-In-Law is also enamored by Yeong-hye’s mental vulnerability–specifically, her lack of “resistance” and sleeplike state that indicate the absence of agency (Han 53). 

Brother-In-Law goes on to act on his sexual thoughts about Yeong-hye and continue the cycle of abuse. Promising healing and a cure to her dreams, Brother-In-Law allows himself into Yeong-hye’s unlocked house and has sex with her as she dissociates, “eyes closed” and barely moving (Han 66-67). The subtle violence of the scene breaks the surface after Brother-In-Law stops filming:

In their final minutes of sex she [Yeong-hye] gnashed her teeth, screamed rough and shrill, spat out a panting “stop” and then, at the end, she cried again. (Han 67)

Despite Brother-In-Law’s innocuous characteristics, he commits the same acts of physical and sexual violence as Father and Mr. Cheong. Like the Soldier and the Merchant, Brother-In-Law’s obsession over Yeong-hye–his desire to use and possess her body–leads him to curtail her agency through force. But, alarmingly, Brother-In-Law also manipulates Yeong-hye with seemingly revolutionary and progressive ideals. It is Brother-In-Law’s patriarchy, the patriarchy of the artist, then, that celebrates the female subject and offers false promises of liberation only to reinforce patriarchal structures–an incorporation of anti-patriarchal critique into the patriarchy itself.

Demonstrating Yeong-hye’s resistance against three distinct archetypes of real world forms of patriarchy, Han performs a subversive anti-patriarchal praxis. The violences embodied by Father, Mr. Cheong, and Brother-In-Law are illuminated, exposed, and deconstructed by the mere fact of Yeong-hye’s survival. Yeong-hye’s extraordinary persistence and desire to metamorphose despite societal barriers triumphs over all of the men who oppose her; in the final chapter, all male characters have disappeared as Yeong-hye and In-hye work to process their collective traumas. Soldiers, merchants, and artists have no place in the planet Yeong-hye radically yearns for–in that other-space, where “all of the trees in the world are like brothers and sisters,” Han imagines community and family without patriarchy (Han 83).

Works Cited:

Han, Kang. The Vegetarian. Translated by Deborah Smith, Hogarth, 2018.

Minor Stutters: Reclaiming Deleuze and Kristeva’s Foreigner 

The conflict between the minor and major has appeared throughout literature, history, and art countless times. From musical keys to academic disciplines, the terms major and minor contain several meanings, but almost always exist as mutually exclusive counterparts. When it comes to describing group dynamics and societies, however, the minor and major can define a more complex relationship. The simplest and most common conception of the societal minority and majority is quantitative–the group with more constituents is the majority, and the group with less the minority. Other definitions may take into account power dynamics and histories of difference, but the groupings themselves of minor and major remain rigidly established. Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the minority and majority upturns these distinctions. To Deleuze, the majority is an ideal, fictitious model for a normative appearance, behavior, and being that cannot be achieved or materialized by any person. People thus experience varying degrees of minorness according to their adherence to the major model; conventionally described members of the majority would be closer to the model, and minorities farther away. Operating with this relativistic understanding of the minor and major, Deleuze’s conception of stuttering and Julia Kristeva’s idea of internalized otherness can be interpreted together as possible forms of agency for minorized groups.

In He Stuttered, Deleuze argues for a more minor literature. Praising great Western writers such as Kafka, Melville, and Masoch, Deleuze speaks of a “minor use of the major language” that “make[s] the language take flight, […] ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium” (109). In other words, by subverting popular literary conventions and leaning into a sense of otherness, he insists that writers can “undertake a vast phonetic, lexical, and even syntactic creation” (Deleuze 109). The stutter serves a practical end of innovation–giving “birth to a foreign language within language”–and also refinement, unlocking “the poetic or linguistic power par excellence” (Deleuze 111-112). Considering its use as a literary and semiotic practice, Deleuze places the stutter at the height of artistic merit.

Although Deleuze advocates for the radical deconstruction of language, he still seems to adhere to certain Western conventions. Notably, in his conception of stuttering, Deleuze emphasizes the singular: the stutterer “draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him” (109-110). Such a definition effaces the role of community solidarity in minor literatures, the word “only” restricting the possibilities of the stutter to a singular expression. Deleuze’s stuttering, it seems, comes from a majoritarian and privileged perspective. It is that of the major emulating the minor, a conscious, concerted effort to promote literary achievement by eschewing the major’s conventions. Deleuze praises the writing of foreign authors–“Luca the Romanian, Beckett the Irishman” and Kafka the “Czech writing in German”–because they are foreigners writing in German, English, and French, not because of their foreignness (109-110).

The shortcomings of Deleuze’s stuttering come to light in his analysis and praise of Colonel T.E Lawrence’s orientalist autobiography of British military intervention during the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “Lawrence made English stumble in order to extract from it the music and visions of Arabia” (110). Several assumptions and generalizations are apparent in this ostensible example of stuttering. By insinuating that English must “stumble” to properly represent “Arabia,” Deleuze inscribes a normative nationality and ethnicity onto the English language (110). Further, the idea of “extract[ing]” some foreign Arabic essence from English implies that English is the universal language, and all other societies and cultures can be adequately expressed and contained in English terms (110). To Deleuze, “Arabia,” or the Orient, is not its own independent region but rather an Other to the Western Anglophone metropole. On its own, Deleuze’s stutter does not leave room for legitimately foreign and subaltern agencies. Deleuze’s Other is a tokenized foreigner, foreign only as a singular entity but lacking a culture and homeland of their own.

As Deleuze’s vision of stuttering is fraught with excessive singularity and orientalism, we are left to wonder how one might engage in a more egalitarian stutter. Given that “foreign” is a descriptor typically applied to others and not ourselves, how can we discover our own foreignness and begin to stutter? In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva analyzes Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny to offer an answer in the form of the other within the self:

When we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious–that “improper” facet of our impossible “own and proper.” […] By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. (Kristeva 191-192)

Essentially, Kristeva argues that within the Freudian unconscious, foreignness is produced as a negation of what is familiar. In this sense, what is foreign, or the “improper,” only exists in relation to what is known, or the “own and proper” (Kristeva 191). Foreignness exists within the self as the opposite and necessary counterpart to the familiar, two facets of the same phenomenon. Compared to Deleuze, Kristeva identifies an alternate source of foreignness. Rather than coming from the singular sensation of a minorized identity such as national origin or native tongue, she suggests that even the most normatively privileged of writers can harness the other by simply negating what they know. 

When analyzing Kristeva, it is important to note the majoritarian skew of her perspective. In her conceptualization of the Other as a universal facet of the human experience, Kristeva ignores those who are socially, materially, and structurally othered, who don’t just harbor otherness deep within their unconscious, but instead embody the Other at all times. For marginalized people, Otherness is a constant, conscious experience. If, according to Kristeva, the majority dualistically includes its opposite, the minority, then it follows that the minority must include its opposite, the majority. In a world devoid of power dynamics, this could be a form of equality, but under the influence of White heteropatriarchy, the minority submits to its internalized notions of the majority while the majority consumes and appropriates features of the minority. In this manner, Kristeva’s psychoanalytic cosmopolitanism, “whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconsciousness” is but a dream demonstrative of Kristeva’s relative privilege (192).

Through Kristeva’s generalization of otherness, Deleuze’s conception of stuttering can be applied to more texts. For instance, many Western classics can be considered to stutter under this conception: J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye for its exploration of Holden’s cynical tendencies, Albert Camus’ The Stranger for Meursault’s similarly antisocial bent, or Scott F. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for Jay Gatsby’s feelings of isolation and longing. This, however, is not a particularly nuanced nor productive way of conceptualizing Deleuze’s stutter. To argue that these works, esteemed examples of Western literature, make language “tremble from head to toe” by expressing ideas and feelings contrary to society muddies Deleuze’s argument and weakens the power of the stutter (109). If to stutter is to “minorize” language, then the above works, long-cemented in the narrative of White heteropatriarchy, certainly do not stutter (109). A contradiction arises when we apply the implications and consequences of Deleuze’s stutter to a Kristevan etiology of a universal, internal otherness–stuttering becomes far too accessible to the majority.

If Deleuze’s conception of foreignness is tokenizing and singular, and Kristeva’s Other is too generalized to be of use, how can the stutter manifest in the diverse yet unequal 21st-century landscape? When considering intersections of class, race, gender, and sex, other routes of analysis are possible. While flawed by their majoritarian leanings, Deleuze and Kristeva’s ideas can be redeemed by viewing them through a minor lens.

From the minor perspective, Kristeva’s notion of the stranger within the self has interesting consonances with the experience of double consciousness, the uncanny and shameful sensation of viewing oneself through the major lens. Double consciousness is a form of internalized oppression, leading to self-fulfilling cycles of insecurity and self-hatred. For minor peoples, then, double consciousness serves as a constant source of internal otherness. Yet, Kristeva argues that the subjectivities of otherness can be protective: “by recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside” (192). It follows that the minority can use their foreignness as a form of subaltern resistance. By “recognizing” their fundamental otherness, the minor subject transcends the scrutiny of the majority; because they know they never approach the major model, they are not beholden to it (192). It is precisely the inability of the minority to meet the standards of the majority that frees the minority from those standards.

Placing this minor reading of Kristeva alongside Deleuze’s stutter provides a more comprehensive model for stuttering. By recognizing and acknowledging minor and subaltern inadequacies as Kristeva describes–minor ”fragments, allusions, strivings, investigations”–the minor writer “can reach the limits of language itself” (Deleuze 113). These written and suggested admissions of guilt, failure, and insecurity are the natural language of the minor writer who, by living in the society of the majority, fundamentally and internally understands what it means to be and contain the other. Systemically and historically excluded from knowledge-production and language, the word of the minor writer is inherently “an embarrassed word, a stuttering” (Deleuze 113). Understanding Deleuze’s stutter through a minor lens, minor writers are empowered with the ability to exceed and iterate upon language.

In collective, minor stutterings are amplified. Conversely to Deleuze’s singular “mute and unknown minority,” in coalition, stuttering evolves from an individual expression to a discourse of its own (Deleuze 109). As one writer reveals otherness or familiarity in one place, another writer contributes their minor experiences in another. The inadequacies of one are picked up, compounded, and echoed by the inadequacies of another, straining the language to and beyond its limits. The cumulative effect of the stutters of the swarm is a constant and continuous hum–a minor buzz, unflaggingly and indelibly reminding the universe of the minority’s existence. Embracing their otherhood, marginalized communities carve out their own counterhegemony, agitating language until agency bleeds out.

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles. “He Stuttered.” Essays Critical and Clinical, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, pp. 107–14. 

Kristeva, Julia. “Might Not Universality Be … Our Own Foreignness?” Strangers to Ourselves, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999, pp. 182–92.