Meat, limits, and breaking points: Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Ang Li's The Butcher's Wife

Many environmental ills (swine flu, avian flu, COVID-19, deforestation, fresh¬water mismanagement, methane pollution, and so on) owe their existence in part or in whole to humanity's fondness for meat, a fondness that often pushes (and sometimes breaks) environmental limits; it is not only environmental limits, however, that meat pushes to the breaking point, and recent literary depictions of the enmeshment of meat-eating attitudes with unsustainable patriarchal ideologies in South Korea and Taiwan are indeed revealing. Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Ang Li's The Butcher's Wife each, in very dif¬ferent ways, expose the strands of "meat and gender" enmeshments in Korea and Taiwan, respectively. In both of these short novels, carnivorism and patriarchal power are mutually interdependent, and challenging one means challenging the other. So deeply rooted are the entangled strands of carnivorism and sexism that contesting them (either together or apart) means dismantling the very definition of human corporeality: in The Vegetarian, this means that a woman becomes a plant; in The Butcher's Wife, it means that a man becomes the very cattle he has spent his life slaughtering; in both, questioning meat is a very dangerous affair. In both novels, the challenge comes from a woman, and the narrative perspective is clearly feminist. Both novels plainly show deep analogies and correspondences between domestic violence and violence against animals, and yet, in both novels, there is a taut relationship between vegetable-based histories and a more meat-based modernity. With close reference to each text, my chapter will argue first that the violence of meat-eating portrayed in The Vegetarian and The Butcher's Wife is both physical and psychological. Dreams and madness are involved. Normalcy is male; deviance is female. Order is meat, chaos vegetal. And the threat of death will either be fully realized or will hang menacingly in the air. Second, I will argue that the novels importantly show that breaking points (psychological and envi¬ronmental) are often utterly unpredictable and that once breached, the results can also be devastatingly unpredictable.