https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1345569
https://doi.org/10.60056/Lit.2025.34.59-79
To Be a Woman or to Be a Plant? Forms of Subjectivity in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
Zofia Jakubowicz-Prokop
translated from Polish by Stanka Bonova
Examining Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, Jakubowicz-Prokop brings together two contextualizing perspectives, namely the position of women in Korean culture as seen mostly in contemporary literature, and the role of plants as presented in Western philosophy. The main goal of this article is to explain the protagonist’s transformation as a process of becoming-a-plant – a process that presents the only possible form of freedom in a world of rigorous gender roles and a dualistic concept of reality. Becoming-a-plant is portrayed as a way of being that eludes the metaphysical tradition and presents an attempt to rethink the subject anew.
Keywords: Kang (Han); The Vegetarian; Korea; aesthetics; plant; becoming
About the author: Zofia Jakubowicz-Prokop – born 1993, student in master’s program at the Institute of Polish Culture and the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. She deals with the anthropology of words and aesthetics, and studies the presence of animals and plants in prose and philosophy.
