Kate Hamilton is a Professor of English at a university where she teaches literature, literary theory, and women’s writing. She has
published numerous books and dozens of academic articles and chapters on a wide array of authors, and she has given talks and keynote speeches about literature, pedagogy, and sexual violence at conferences and workshops throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Her first trade publication,
Mad Wife uses these decades of work on literature and sexual violence to clarify her own dark past and illuminate clearer paths forward for other women.
At Lit Hub Hamilton tagged
eight books "concerning women’s desire, consent, and autonomy, especially as distorted by marriage." One title on the list:
Han Kang, The Vegetarian (trans. Deborah Smith)
The Vegetarian has gotten a lot of attention as a Man Booker winner whose English translation differs dramatically from its Korean original (and now as the best-known work by our newest Nobel Prize laureate in literature). But little attention has been paid to the novel’s serious treatment of the.jpg)
role unwanted marital sex plays in a husband’s socially sanctioned disregard of his wife’s personhood and in her profound suffering.
Yeong-hye never tells her own story. First, her callous husband describes her mystifying disobedience; then her brother-in-law transforms her into an object for his own creative and sexual pursuits. Finally her sister, In-hye, understands the rationale and bravery of Yeong-hye’s efforts to “shuck off the human” by attempting to transform—Daphne-like—into a tree, first refusing to eat animal flesh and then to ingest anything but sunlight.
This manifestation of Yeong-hye’s attempt to elude male objectification is a version of the anorexia that often accompanies sexual or domestic abuse, which I describe experiencing in Mad Wife. If Yeong-hye can’t be saved, her example can inspire In-hye, and all of us, to “wake up” from the trance of patriarchy that renders women as subhuman from the start.
Read about
another entry on the list.
The Vegetarian is among
Monika Kim's five best body horror novels,
Adam Biles's top ten allegories,
M. S. Coe's eleven titles about women on the brink, and
Amy Sackville's ten top novels about painters.
--Marshal Zeringue
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