Metamorphosis is a total change in form that creates an entirely new network of connections. While it does involve physical transformation, it also means breaking away from what is considered normal. Suddenly, the transformation happens, catching everyone involved off guard. Looking at different perspectives on transformation, it is clear that it can sometimes feel like a mistake. But no matter the reason behind it, metamorphosis always comes with victims.
When comparing how the physical body is portrayed in the myths told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses with how Lucretius describes it, Charles Segal, in his journal article “Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the “Metamorphoses”, argues that Ovid sees the body as vulnerable, porous, and easily penetrated. His work celebrates the body’s endless submission to physical change. Constantly, it finds new metaphors and situations that intensify rather than ease anxiety.
Ovid’s characters do not exist as “individual narratives” but more like winding storylines—defined by their traits, minor adjectives, divine origins, or simply by being the object of someone’s gaze. What makes Metamorphoses stand out is how it connects the physical body to transformation.
Comparing this to modern views on the body and self-narrative, Segal explains that modern literary sensibilities tend to unravel highly individual life stories filled with deeply personal details when dealing with the body. However, in Metamorphoses, it is not the body that leads the narrator to the story; it is the story that’s forced to end with something happening to the body.
In our analysis, we’ll explore how Han Kang approaches transformation in an Ovidian way in The Vegetarian, especially through Hye’s story and how she chooses (or refuses) to tell it. Her presence in the novel begins and ends unexpectedly with her “body,” a body that remains eerily silent.
With Kang, there is an extra layer to the physical body: in The Vegetarian, the physical aspect of metamorphosis is so extreme that it is almost impossible. The novel is filled with transformations bound to fail physically, yet these very failures drive the narrative and make transformation possible. We want to explore this idea of “failed metamorphosis” in The Vegetarian and its Ovidian execution to understand better what metamorphosis actually “does” in a story.
Joseph B. Solodow, in his book The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, explores the nature of transformation in Ovid’s work. He emphasizes that there is always a “continuity” between who someone was before and who they become. However, there is no way to predict precisely what they will turn into. He delves into growth and figures that it functions as a “clarification” (a procedure where an individual’s actual and random features carry on a material condition, causing them visual and actual).
Ovid’s policy of change exacerbates both literal and symbolic change. Kang accomplishes this in The Vegetarian to create an anticipation of material change, which eventually has to fall. By pushing the limits of literal transformation, Kang creates space for anticipation; by the novel’s end, it becomes clear why Yeong-hye wants to become a tree or why In-hye can finally break free from her silence.
Kang reverses the physical aspect of metamorphosis; even though it feels almost tangible, it never fully materializes. Instead, she “twists” this transformation into a disturbing and unsettling reality.
The story follows Yeong-hye, a quiet and unremarkable woman living in Seoul whose life drastically turns after a nightmare about eating raw meat. She suddenly stops eating meat, which enrages her husband, Mr. Cheong, who sees it as an act of defiance. As Yeong-hye’s behavior becomes more erratic (losing weight, refusing sex, and even stripping naked at home), her family intervenes. However, when they try to force-feed her meat, she reacts violently and attempts suicide.
Two years later, Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist obsessed with body painting, becomes fixated on her after discovering she still has a Mongolian mark. He convinces her to model for him, painting her body with flowers. His obsession turns sexual, leading him to manipulate Yeong-hye into having recorded sex with him. When his wife, In-hye, finds the recording, she reports him, and he attempts suicide.
In the final part, Yeong-hye is in a psychiatric hospital, refusing to eat because she believes she can survive like a tree. In-hye, the ever-responsible sister, struggles with guilt and her desire to break free from society’s expectations. Despite all efforts, Yeong-hye’s condition keeps worsening. As the doctors force-feed her, In-hye has a moment of realization—Yeong-hye has chosen her path, even if it leads to destruction. As the story ends, In-hye looks toward the forest, searching for meaning.
Yeong-hye’s failed metamorphosis is unique, but it reveals a lot, not just about the process of transformation but also about its deeper causes, one of which is self-starvation. As Yeong-hye gradually stops eating, her so-called “failed” metamorphosis unfolds. In this sense, she follows in the footsteps of past literary characters who also experienced self-starvation, leading to some form of transformation.
On the spectrum of literary imagination, with Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener on one end (who starves himself but does not physically change) and Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa on the other (who undergoes a physical metamorphosis that leads to self-denial) Yeong-hye’s story aligns more with Bartleby’s than Samsa’s.
Yeong-hye and Bartleby’s stories are strikingly similar, not just in their narratives but also in their narrators. Both stories begin by sidelining their “victims.” Mr. Cheong, our focal narrator, describes Yeong-hye as the most “ordinary” woman he has ever met until she becomes a vegetarian. Similarly, the lawyer in Bartleby, the Scrivener introduces Bartleby as the strangest scrivener he has ever encountered. However, he skips over the other scriveners’ biographies to focus on specific moments in Bartleby’s life, calling him the strangest one he has ever seen or heard of.
This introduction matters because it sets up the story and reveals the narrator’s most crucial trait: their need for self-validation. They present themselves as the ultimate observers who understand and interpret everything.
Bartleby’s one of those unambitious lawyers who never speaks to a jury or seeks public applause. Instead, in the calm comfort of his office, he handles the quiet business of bonds, mortgages, and the property deeds of the wealthy.
Janis Ledwell-Hunt, in Anorexic Affect: Disordered Eating and the Conative Body, points out how anorexia is often oversimplified. She argues that disordered eating and an irregular lifestyle do not have to be mutually exclusive. According to her, some people with anorexia maintain their practices throughout their lives, and in many cases, their vitality comes from these practices. As long as anorexia is only seen as something defined by lack (lack of nourishment, emptiness, disappearing, shrinking, or letting go), we will keep missing some of its more complex motivations.
Anorexia has its roots in patriarchal norms and is both socially and self-imposed. Anorexia, according to Susie Orbach in Hunger Strike: The Anorexic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age, is an attempt to fit in with a society that fundamentally excludes women. It is a desperate solution to exist in a world that, at its core, makes someone feel like they do not belong and have no right to take up space.
It is an effort to be “enough” (good, pure, sacred, and untainted enough to be accepted and not rejected). It is about embodying the values of that world and conforming to them in the hope of finding security and approval. At the same time, it is also a subtle rebellion, an attempt to rise above the world’s common expectations and values to reject it from a position of temporary superiority.
In that sense, anorexia works as a psychological coping mechanism, a way to connect with the world while also resisting it. It raises an important question: Why do women with anorexia feel so deeply undeserving, rejected, inadequate, impure, and tainted?
Anorexia is not just about body image or a fear of fat; it is way more complicated than that. Orbach describes anorexia as a “hunger strike,” framing it as both a political protest and a power struggle. She strips away the medical and pathological aspects of anorexia, redefining it not as an individual illness or neurosis but as a form of resistance, a way for the oppressed to fight back, a political statement from women rejecting the way their bodies are coded into an unwelcoming version of femininity.
This idea is based on the assumption that women are inherently tied to the body. Since women’s bodies have been “coded as an unwelcoming femininity,” anorexia becomes “the return of the repressed.” Many critics argue that women are forced to be “the body,” while men position themselves as the rational, intellectual “everything else.”
In Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo explains that this role “weighs on women” and that the cost of such projection is precise. Because if, no matter the historical specifics of this duality, the body is seen as unfavorable, and if women “are” the body, then women “are” that negativity, whatever that may mean: a distraction from knowledge, a temptation away from God, surrender to sexual desire, violence or aggression, a failure of will, or even death.
Thus, anorexia is both a disease imposed on women and a vehicle for them to rebel against what it means to be a woman (culturally, discursively, physiologically, politically, and economically).
Both Bordo and Orbach argue that anorexia is deeply tied to patriarchal ideals that impose strict expectations on women’s bodies. Bordo talks about how the female body is coded as a site of oppression: women “are” the body, while men “are” the mind. This binary forces women to either conform to or reject societal norms, with eating disorders like anorexia acting as a form of rebellion against or submission to these constraints.
Orbach agrees with this view, defining anorexia as both an imposed condition and an act of protest. She argues that anorexia is an attempt to conform to and reject femininity at the same time, as women use their bodies to “speak” against societal pressures.
In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s self-starvation can be seen as both a rejection of societal expectations and the internal consequences of those expectations. At first, she stops eating meat because of a nightmare, but her vegetarianism escalates into a complete refusal of food. Her thinness and withdrawal from society mirror the ways patriarchal structures try to control and diminish women’s bodies.
However, Yeong-hye’s starvation is not just a rebellion against patriarchal beauty standards. Unlike traditional cases of anorexia nervosa, she is not obsessed with thinness or appearance. Instead, her refusal to eat seems like a more profound rejection of the world itself, making her case more complex than the standard feminist interpretation of anorexia.
Ledwell-Hunt pushes back against the oversimplification of anorexia as mere self-denial and instead highlights its sensory, psychological, and even kinetic aspects. He points out that anorexic behaviors (like restlessness, hunger, heightened awareness, and movement) are often overlooked in favor of pathologizing the disorder. Ledwell-Hunt argues that anorexia is not just about deprivation or loss; it is also about feeling and experiencing one’s body in new ways.
Yeong-hye’s transformation aligns with this theory. She enters a heightened sensory state where she starts believing she is turning into a plant. She wants to photosynthesize and rejects food entirely. It reflects Ledwell-Hunt’s claim that anorexia is about disappearing and about engaging with the body differently. Yeong-hye’s movements show that she is experiencing her body in a way that defies medical categorization. It supports Ledwell-Hunt’s argument that anorexia should not be reduced to a simple pathology but understood as a complex interaction with the body.
Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia introduces the idea of self-starvation as a spiritual practice, especially among medieval saints like Catherine of Siena. According to Bell, these women did not starve themselves to control their body image but to achieve purity and divine autonomy. In Fasting Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg expands on this idea by exploring how fasting historically shifted from a religious act to a medical disorder. She argues that while modern anorexia is often medicalized, earlier forms of fasting were seen as acts of spiritual devotion.
Yeong-hye’s starvation mirrors the experiences of medieval saints who fasted. A desire for beauty does not drive her refusal to eat but an internal need to escape violence and impurity. She sees flesh as inherently corrupt, and she believes she can purify herself by rejecting it. As her condition worsens, she talks about wanting to become a plant, which can be seen as a form of ascetic transcendence.
However, unlike the saints, who were often socially recognized for their fasting, Yeong-hye is entirely isolated. She is institutionalized, treated as mentally ill, and stripped of her agency. It shows that self-starvation is no longer seen as spiritual devotion but as a pathology in a modern context. Yeong-hye’s case blurs the line between the medical and the metaphysical.
In The Fruit of My Woman, the transformation happens. Like The Vegetarian, the story is told from the husband’s perspective, but unlike Mr. Cheong in The Vegetarian, this husband is not horrible. Instead, he still cares for his wife even after she fully transforms. In that sense, we agree with Deborah Smith that this metamorphosis feels more Kafkaesque than Ovidian. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, characters who transform lose their narrative agency, but in this story, the woman’s voice continues after her transformation, making her more like Samsa than an Ovidian character.
However, considering the idea of a “failed metamorphosis” in The Vegetarian and its Ovidian tones, we can analyze the novel beyond whether the transformation happens. Instead, we can look at how “its absence” changes the meaning and creates a different metamorphosis narrative.
Andrew Feldherr, in his article Metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses from The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, writes that each transformation opens up the possibility for contrasting responses. At the same time, the way metamorphosis shifts across different literary discourses makes it a narrative device that invites opposing readings and multiple interpretations.
Ovid plays with this process by presenting different perspectives on transformation and questioning the nature of his work’s genre. In this way, metamorphosis constantly forces the reader to rethink their relationship with the text, their understanding of its narrative, and how the text functions as a literary representation.
Kang plays with this idea by “disrupting” the core element of Ovidian metamorphosis while still evoking Ovid’s themes of change and embodiment. It is just one of the many ways The Vegetarian explores the body and literature, layering different perspectives on transformation, identity, and control.
The solution is female in Yeong-hye’s imagined “ideal” reality of metamorphosis. Kang explores the complexities of the female body crisis in a way beyond surface-level interpretations. The relationship between women and their bodies plays a role in Yeong-hye’s equation of violence.
Looking at medical and feminist perspectives on anorexia, it all comes down to the comparison between the body and femininity. The objectification of women’s bodies and the violence forced upon them contribute to self-hatred, body image obsessions, and even a fear of simply taking up space. As a result, women often try to “erase the feminine” from their bodies. Yeong-hye, a victim of rape and violence, fits into this framework, but she also “rejects” it. She creates an alternative existence.
She says she wants to become a tree so that life can grow and spread from between her legs. Earlier in the novel, in one of her stream-of-consciousness moments, she reflects on her changing body, saying she can only trust her breasts and wonders why they keep shrinking, and her face keeps changing. Through Yeong-hye’s experience, Kang re-feminizes what has been stripped of its womanhood, reclaiming the body in a new way.
References
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- Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana University Press.
- Han, K. (2015). The Vegetarian (D. Smith, Trans.). Portobello Books. (Original work published 2007)
- Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
- Ovid. (2004). Metamorphoses (D. Raeburn, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 8 CE)
- Şerban, A. (2018). The Ethics of Metamorphosis: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Journal of World Literature, 3(1), 72-89.
- Torlasco, D. (2017). The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film. Fordham University Press.
