Hopeful Reading: Rethinking Resistance in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship, this article proposes an interpretative framework of hopeful reading to locate resistant forms of hope in South Korean writer Han Kang’s award-winning novel The Vegetarian, which is permeated with violence. Unlike mainstream positive thinking promoted by positive psychology that keeps the status quo intact, hopeful reading is rebellious, generative, and transformative in nature. Hopeful reading shifts the analytical focus from what disables one from acting in a hopeless situation to how one can be enabled to remain active in the very same situation. Applying this lens to analyze The Vegetarian, this article argues that hope is not ignited through suppressed women characters’ successful changes to continue what life used to be before violence. Instead, failing to properly resist or act turns out to facilitate the women characters to imagine and experiment with what their lives could have been or could become, which sparks the light of hope in the darkness of the novel.