Published Paper Details:

This study examines the transformation of Yeong-hye in Han Kang's The Vegetarian by reading her bodily withdrawal as a form of hyperreal mediation rather than as a purely psychological or pathological condition. Although earlier criticism has largely approached the novel through feminist or psychoanalytic frameworks, this paper places it within a broader conversation between literary analysis and media theory. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's account of hyperreality and Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze, the analysis suggests that Yeong-hye's rejection of food and social norms gradually becomes a mediated spectacle. Her experience is shaped, in particular, by the brother-in-law's voyeuristic attention and his visual recording of her body, through which her lived presence is displaced by a reproducible image. Ecofeminist perspectives, especially those of Gaard and Plumwood, further clarify how this withdrawal can be read as a resistance to patriarchal forms of control that reduce the female body to an object of use and display. At the same time, the paper argues that Yeong-hye's final silence and physical refusal reveal the limits of hyperreal capture. Even within systems of intense mediation, her embodied resistance asserts a form of phenomenological autonomy, challenging the dominance of visual and digital representations over lived experience.