Comparison of Yeong-Hye in the Vegetarian and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights:a Psychoanalytic Study

The study offers a comparative psychoanalytic reading of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Hang Kang's The Vegetarian while dealing with two female protagonists, Catherine Earnshaw and Yeong-Hye respectively. Both novels are written by female authors, depicting the two patriarchal societies and psychologically unstable female characters. Adopting a qualitative approach, close-reading technique, the analysis applies Freud’s psychological concepts of defense mechanism and dream work/interpretation. While analyzing both characters, they were found to balance their internal and external worlds by using defense mechanism such as asceticism, undoing, displacement, rationalization and projection. For instance, they stopped eating, projected their worries to others, justified their behaviors and directed their anger toward less threatening targets. However, their behaviours also differed due to different cultural and contextual contexts. Yeong-Hye’s dreams reflected childhood trauma, whereas Catherine’s dreams revealed repressed fears about her future. Moreover, the conclusions revealed that both the characters suffered from madness as Catherine was affected by hallucinations and Yeong-Hye acted totally absurd, denied human basic urges/needs such as food, physical intimacy, violating social norms and declared herself a tree. In short, psychology played a greater role in lives of both the characters and due to different causes both of them lost their mental balance.