CAESURA 6.1 (2019) CONSTRICTING LIFE: CONSTRUCTING/DECONSTRUCTING VIOLENCE IN HAN KANG’S THE VEGETARIAN JASMINE ANAND * ABSTRACT. In the wake of vegan rage throughout the world especially in Europe due to climate change and realisation of violent means towards animals, a vegan-feminist study of Han Kang’s Korean novel The Vegetarian becomes very pertinent. Han Kang is definitely not directly endorsing veganism but tries to question “if it is possible for a human to completely reject any kind of violence and become a flawless, innocent being”. The paper will delinate how animal vis a vis a woman’s life is linked and shrinks under the influence of patriarchy, anthroparchy, and capitalism. It will also study how violence is subtly perpetrated and con- structed as a moral or routine order under these institutions. Yeong-hye as the submissive protagonist calls her shots by abstaining herself from meat eating practice in a masculine world under the influence and awareness coming out of her blood curdling violent and haunting dreams. She deconstructs the idea of violence and refutes patriarchal and capitalist system around her by imagining herself as a plant gradually. Her nakedness is not erotic or sensual but a natural earthly innocent answer to the violent systems surrounding her. The paper also tries to caveat her extreme response and female desire to undo violence around and to take “the responsibility to work at each instant for [her] own evolution, transformation, transfigura- tion or transubstantiation”. The work surely has an undercurrent of an appeal for world peace (especially the divide between North and South Korea) which is invisible amidst the visible violence. KEY WORDS: vegetarian, vegan, violence, patriarchy, capitalist society Introduction Han Kang’s Korean novel The Vegetarian is the winner of Man Booker In- ternational Prize 2016. The novel is an epitome of how in subtle patriarchal responses a female’s life, choices, and desires are constricted which in turn disturbs the status quo leading to slow fossilization and vegetable state of a woman’s body. The original Korean novel written by Han Kang was pub- lished in 2007. The author in this novel takes off the image of a woman turning into a plant from her short story “The Fruit of My Woman” written in 1997. The protagonist considers herself as a plant, not a human anymore and abstains from food (meat) symbolising human violence. The novel got * JASMINE ANAND (PhD 2019, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India) is Assistant Professor in the Post Graduate Department of English at Mehr Chand Mahajan DAV College for Women, Chandigarh, India. E-mail: jasmine18anand@gmail.com.