Dear Reader,

 “She was standing, motionless, in front of the fridge. Her face was submerged in the darkness so I couldn’t make out her expression, but the potential options all filled me with fear. Her thick, naturally black hair was fluffed up, dishevelled, and she was wearing her usual white ankle-length nightdress.”

This scene, with a woman in a white nightdress, her face in darkness, could be straight out of a horror movie. South Korean author Han Kang’s book, The Vegetarian (translated into English by Deborah Smith), from where the lines are quoted, could well be a horror novel in the Gothic tradition. All the tropes are there—a distressed woman protagonist (Yeong-hye), her terrifying dreams, the unconcerned partner, the callous parents, the repeated suggestions of killing and bloodshed, the dissolving borders between imagination and reality, and a descent into madness for the woman at the centre. 

Written 230 years ago, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, considered an exemplary Gothic romance, also has a terrified woman protagonist whose perception of reality is so much under threat that she feels she is losing her mind. 

The Gothic novel, which came into vogue in the late 18th and early 19th century, is intimately connected with women’s experiences. Written mostly by women, they foreground a woman’s sense of unease and dissociation in a society run on rules codified by men, largely for men. In the contemporary world, this disconnect is not just between men and women but between the neurotypical and the neurodivergent. The latter find themselves cornered, dismissed as weird, when they refuse to toe the former’s line. The Gothic novel proliferates with dream visions, unexplained terrors, all suggesting the splintering of the mind under duress.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which teases out the potential of the genre to the fullest to go beyond horror tropes and ask deeply philosophical questions, creates the ultimate outsider in Dr Frankenstein’s monster, who is hounded just for what he is, for not conforming to human standards. He is judged not just mad and bad, but a “creature”, an animal deserving no sympathy. Which begs the question—why do animals deserve no sympathy? Because they are less powerful than humans? By that measure, whoever is less powerful—women against men, children against grown-ups, poor against rich—can be crushed with impunity.

The Vegetarian begins with Yeong-hye’s husband, who takes pride in his ordinariness, eyeing his wife with suspicion because, while being usual in every possible way, she is yet transgressing boundaries by rejecting meat. The decision to shun meat might seem too trivial a choice to occasion the extreme reactions of the people around Yeong-hye. But what they actually take umbrage at is Yeong-hye’s questioning of the given, that too as a woman.

In a society where the ideal wife is expected to be biddable, she has thrown the first stone of defiance by starting to think for herself. Beginning as faint ridicule, the resentment against her quickly spirals into savage reprisals, and culminates in abandonment. Yeong-hye is declared unfit for normal life because she has rebelled against the killing of animals for food, against the idea that they are mere creatures, like the Frankenstein monster, not deserving of any sympathy. She has struck at the very construct of humanity, and must be punished for it. 

At the end of the novel, when Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye, tries to comfort her by saying that sinister dreams should not be taken seriously, “We have to wake up at some point, don’t we?” we shudder, wondering which is preferrable—the nightmare or the nightmarish reality of a cruelly unequal and unjust world. 

It is apt that the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2024—a year which has seen the killing of more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children in Gaza—should go to Han Kang. Check out Geeta Doctor’s analysis of The Vegetarian here. Read it alongside Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s essay explaining Han Kang’s refusal to celebrate her Nobel win in a violence-ridden society.

Another piece you should not miss in this edition is Shivendra Singh’s essay on The New Yorker’s iconic 1997 photograph of 10 Indian English authors. Who were these eminences? What did they represent? “The ‘Group Shot’, in addition to being a sentimental one for many who follow and engage with Indian writing in English, is also a reminder of the last gathering of such writers who did not succumb to political propaganda, indulge in expedient social and moral grandstanding, or use their celebrity for their own benefit,” Singh writes. It is an interesting comment that invites debate.

We will continue the conversation next time, as usual. Till then, enjoy the falling leaves, the congealing afternoon light, the lingering twilight—quite Gothic, I would say!

Anusua Mukherjee