Bodily autonomy and coercion

Bodily autonomy and coercion are central to the novel’s account of Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat and In-hye’s struggle to understand what that refusal means. The body is treated both as a site of personal choice and as an object claimed by family authority and medical care. The distinction is not abstract: it turns on who may decide what enters a body, who may restrain it, and whether an intervention intended to preserve life can also repeat the coercion that has marked a person’s history.

Family Authority and Learned Submission

Yeong-hye’s vegetarian turn, roughly three years before In-hye’s later reflections, begins a sequence in which her bodily choices become a family crisis. She loses substantial weight, sleeps very little, and becomes increasingly difficult to reach through ordinary conversation. At a family housewarming, their father responds to her refusal of meat by forcing food into her mouth. When she spits it out, she takes a fruit knife and injures herself. The episode makes the family’s conflict over food inseparable from the question of who has authority over Yeong-hye’s body.

The violence belongs to a longer pattern, not an isolated breach of temper. In-hye recalls that Yeong-hye was the only one of the siblings who bore their father’s beatings. Their brother Yeong-ho could answer force with force, while In-hye, as the eldest daughter, earned a measure of their father’s consideration by helping their mother and serving him. Yeong-hye, docile and unable to resist him, absorbed the violence. In retrospect, In-hye recognizes that her own role as the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter was not simply maturity; it was a way of surviving within the family’s arrangements. Her belated understanding gives the sisters’ different bodily responses a shared history: one learned accommodation, while the other became the direct object of punishment.

The housewarming also exposes In-hye’s position between witness and participant. She remembers standing rigid while her father forced food on Yeong-hye, and later asks herself whether she could have stopped him or taken the knife away. Her questions recur alongside regret that her husband, Mr. Cheong, became the person who took Yeong-hye to hospital and then coldly cast her aside after her admission. In-hye also condemns what he subsequently did to Yeong-hye, though these reflections do not make her earlier power to intervene certain. The episode leaves her with responsibility as an unresolved question rather than a simple account of either innocence or control.

Marriage and the Limits of Consent

In-hye’s own marriage presents a quieter but persistent violation of bodily choice. After her husband returns home early one morning following several days away, she pushes him away and says she is tired. He tells her to endure it for a minute. Half asleep, she gets through the encounter by telling herself it will soon be over and that she can put up with it. The account does not frame endurance as consent: her attempt to minimize the moment is followed by pain and shame, and later she finds herself wanting to hurt herself at the breakfast table.

This memory sits within a wider crisis of ownership. In-hye looks at the objects in the home and feels they do not belong to her, just as her life has not felt like her own. Her outward continuation of daily routine does not resolve that estrangement; it conceals it. The contrast with Yeong-hye’s refusal is sharp but not simple. Yeong-hye’s resistance becomes visible through refusal, while In-hye has survived by continuing, even when that continuation requires her to suppress what has happened to her. Both lives reveal how bodily autonomy can be narrowed not only by overt force but by circumstances in which a person feels there is no workable alternative.

For a week, In-hye has also been taking down a mobile that she and Ji-woo decorated, patiently untying its thick cord and putting away its colored paper and cellophane. She eventually puts the cord in her pocket, leaves the apartment before dawn, and walks toward the mountain. This repeated, deliberate dismantling of an ordinary household object precedes her departure and places her own crisis alongside her sister’s. The narrative connects their situations without making them identical: In-hye’s actions register an urgent break from a life she has experienced as not her own.

Clinical Care and Coercive Procedure

At the psychiatric hospital, medical staff interpret Yeong-hye’s continued refusal to eat through both psychiatric and nutritional risk. A doctor tells In-hye that Yeong-hye’s condition has not improved and that the next step is intravenous feeding; if that fails to stabilize her, she may need transfer to a critical ward at the general hospital. He explains that Yeong-hye is refusing food while suffering from schizophrenia, that the staff do not know exactly why she will not eat, and that the medicines given to her have not worked. He also says the doctors’ primary duty is to preserve life and that they cannot be sure of keeping her alive in the psychiatric hospital.

That explanation establishes the genuine stakes of treatment while also showing how institutional knowledge defines the available choices. The doctor describes the difficulty of understanding Yeong-hye’s refusal, contrasts it with cases in which a patient fears food is poisoned, and admits that her course could not have been predicted. Yet the practical decision is increasingly procedural: her condition is judged, her transfer considered, and feeding planned despite the uncertainty about what she is refusing and why. The narrative holds medical concern and institutional authority together rather than treating them as interchangeable or suggesting that the danger to Yeong-hye is unreal.

The hospital’s everyday safeguards make that authority physical and spatial. When Yeong-hye is admitted to a six-person ward, a nurse checks the clothes and toiletries in her bag, apparently looking for strings or pins, and removes the long woolen belt from In-hye’s coat. The ward door is locked, and the window has heavy vertical bars. These details place care within a system designed to manage risk by restricting access and movement. In-hye’s guilty feeling as she stands at the barred window, with Yeong-hye beside her, shows that protective arrangements do not erase the emotional cost of confinement.

Before a later attempt to feed Yeong-hye through a tube, a doctor warns In-hye that her sister may appear unconscious but is intensely focused elsewhere. He says that forcibly bringing her out of that state can make clear she has been awake, and that a family member may find the experience difficult to witness. The doctor’s account gives Yeong-hye’s apparent unresponsiveness a more complicated meaning than simple absence of awareness, even as it anticipates the staff’s decision to proceed with treatment.

Refusal, Resistance, and the Sister’s Intervention

During the feeding attempt, Yeong-hye resists the tube and the carers’ efforts to hold her still. When she speaks clearly, she says that she does not like it and does not like eating. Her words make the refusal legible as an expressed aversion, though they do not resolve the clinical danger that prompted the procedure. In-hye is close enough to hold her sister’s face and call her name, but staff then move her out of the room, saying her presence is making matters more difficult. The sister’s impulse to remain near Yeong-hye and the institution’s need to control the scene pull in opposing directions.

The tube is inserted after another attempt, but Yeong-hye’s body continues to resist the procedure. When blood appears in the tube and at her mouth, In-hye tells the staff to remove it and pulls the doctor back. Her response interrupts the treatment rather than allowing the procedure to continue unquestioned. The scene does not settle the conflict between preserving Yeong-hye’s life and respecting her refusal; instead, it makes that conflict immediate for the family and the clinical team. In-hye’s intervention is at once an act of protection and a confrontation with the care system on which her sister depends.

After leaving the room, In-hye takes the letter requesting Yeong-hye’s admission to the main hospital and collapses in a bathroom, where she vomits. She repeats an insult to herself, then looks into the mirror and thinks that the body is the one area in which a person is free to do as they please, only for even that freedom not to turn out as desired. The thought is not a confident declaration of control: the day’s events have shown how family members and medical staff can act upon Yeong-hye’s body, while In-hye herself struggles to claim authority over her own. Her physical reaction and her words register the strain of witnessing care become force without reducing the doctors’ stated concern for survival to mere cruelty.

Meaning and Limits of Bodily Autonomy

Across these episodes, coercion changes form but retains a common claim: someone else may decide what a woman’s body must endure. The father’s family authority appears in his forcing food on Yeong-hye; In-hye’s marital memory reveals how a refusal can be disregarded in private; and the hospital’s safety measures and feeding procedure turn preservation into a structured exercise of control. The settings and purposes differ, and the account does not equate domestic violence with medical treatment. It does, however, place them in a sequence that makes the question of consent impossible to separate from the question of care.

The sisters’ contrasting responses deepen that account. Yeong-hye’s refusal makes bodily choice impossible for the family and hospital to ignore, but it also places her life in danger. In-hye’s habitual accommodation has not protected her from violations of her own boundaries, and her later intervention cannot undo the history that formed their different positions. Her understanding of their childhood arrives only after Yeong-hye’s crisis has become severe. Bodily autonomy therefore appears neither as unlimited freedom nor as a problem solved by choosing between treatment and abandonment. The novel’s tension lies in the painful space between a person’s right to refuse and others’ efforts to keep her alive, with the body itself recording the consequences of both coercion and care.