Decoding Madness and the Sisterly Bond in the Novel The Vegetarian

Author(s)	Ms. Teresa Tudu
Country	India
Abstract	Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007; trans. 2015) has sparked extensive critical discussion regarding its portrayal of madness, autonomy, gendered violence, and bodily refusal. While much scholarship has focused on Yeong-hye’s “madness” and her symbolic vegetality, fewer studies have examined the ethical relation between Yeong-hye and her sister, In-hye, as the novel’s central axis for interrogating the politics of sanity and social coercion. This paper argues that the sisters function as ethical mirrors whose divergent responses to patriarchal domination, withdrawal versus endurance, illuminate the constructed and gendered nature of sanity in contemporary Korean society. Through a framework combining Michel Foucault’s discourse of madness, feminist care ethics (Gilligan, Tronto, Kittay), and medical anthropology’s critique of psychiatric authority (Kleinman, Scheper-Hughes), this study reads Yeong-hye’s bodily refusal as a form of ethical dissent and In-hye’s sanity as a fragile social performance sustained by systems of violence. Ultimately, the novel reveals not a binary between sanity and madness but the structural conditions that produce both.
Keywords	Vegetarianism, Autonomy, Madness, Gendered violence, Sisterly bond, Care
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 3, Issue 3, May-June 2021
Published On	2021-06-05

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