‘The Handmaiden’: Rewriting the Gaze

*spoiler alert*

‘The Handmaiden’ is a Korean adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel ‘Fingersmith’, set in Japanese-occupied Korea (while ‘Fingersmith’ is set in Victorian-era Britain). The film uses a three-part structure, imitating Victorian triple decker novels. It follows a pickpocket Sook-hee who is hired by a conman under the guise of ‘Count Fujiwara’. She becomes the maid of Japanese heiress Lady Hideko in order to convince her to marry Fujiwara. The first part introduces his plan to steal Lady Hideko’s inheritance and send her off to a madhouse while Hideko and Sook-hee fall for each other, revealing at the end that Hideko is in fact part of the plot to send Sook-hee to the asylum in her place. The second part then uses a series of flashbacks to show Hideko’s perspective, revealing the psychological and physical abuse that she has been subjected to by her uncle from a young age. The third part shows how Sook-hee and Hideko escape together and find freedom.

The film’s plot rewrites patriarchal narratives - the financial, social, and bodily control that men possess in traditional familial structures and the institution of marriage - through reviewing what the audience thinks is happening in the first part of the film, offering insight into reality in the second part. Hideko’s ideal image as the innocent young heiress is broken by showing the twisted male fantasies that have restricted her physical freedom and ownership of her sexuality. There is a scene where Hideko displays pleasure when performing a scene about women loving women for the male gaze, where queer desire could be seen as a safe space within male-dominated settings. The subsequent scene of the male audience’s enjoyment feels like violent intrusion on female sexual expression, just as the erotic scenes of this film may face criticism for being catered to titillate a male gaze.

However, I think ‘The Handmaiden’ very much consciously presents the oppressive and violent nature of the male gaze, with female characters being self-aware in their gendered performance. The film thus explores queer female sexuality within a space that is highly structured by male power, as Hideko and Sook-hee subvert male narratives within which they are inscribed. The library collection of pornography is literally the canon of male gaze through history, which Hideko and her female family members are groomed to perform. When Hideko and Sook-hee re-enact the pornographic scene mentioned in these texts in the final scene, it could be seen as appropriating and reclaiming female pleasure for their own ends. Certain tropes of Victorian novels used lend themselves especially well to this concept - for instance the marriage plot for the sheltered upper class young woman, the idea that madness is passed down by women in the family, and the gothic aesthetic of a large house with hidden rooms and basements. The film recalls expectations based on established tropes, before dismantling it by uncovering the underlying darkness and perversion that is the patriarchal system.

In my view, ‘The Handmaiden’ highlights not just queer desire as a realm for female autonomy, but also queerness as an alternative to dominant societal structures. Whereas both Sook-hee and Hideko plot to escape their predicaments of poverty and familial control respectively through participating in Fujiwara’s scheme, the only true way to freedom for both of them is working together to elope. A foil to such female solidarity is Madame Sasaki, the first wife of Hideko’s uncle, who becomes his butler to help him inflict physical and psychological torture on the women who have replaced her. Her own relative safety is predicated on the subjugation of other women, and her ghostly appearance may be a figurative representation of the spectres of sadistic destruction that inhabit familial (and by extension societal) history. Furthermore, the fact that Sook-hee was sent to the asylum in place of Hideko demonstrates how female bodies are easily replaceable, not just by perverse patriarchs, but by public health institutions of the time. The self-determination of a singular woman very much depends on other substitutes for her suffering.

While stereotypical Victorian narratives suggest that marriage is a happy resolution for women, or that women are able to manipulate the limitations of their circumstance by finding empowerment within the so-called domestic sphere, this film shows how this is ultimately at the expense of other women. Legitimate avenues of action in the film are exposed as oppressive mechanisms wielded by men - whether it is family inheritance or mental asylums that imprison women. ‘The Handmaiden’ therefore proposes that real liberation of the marginalised has to be achieved outside the system - through criminals who set the madhouse on fire, and through women disguising themselves with male identities. Sook-hee’s unbridled energy in destroying the pornographic library is so satisfying to watch because her raw anger is an absolute rejection of facades of social status and propriety. In this way, queerness represents the possibility of authenticity for women where heterosexual relations are defined by performance and pretense, and illicit desire challenges power dynamics by offering Otherness (or the alternative to mainstream) as a real path to freedom.

All in all, I interpreted ‘The Handmaiden’ as a rewriting of cultural subtexts from both “Eastern” and “Western” canon, with its abundant allusions to literature and art. The materiality of female bodies and of queer desire are centered as active agents, even while they are inevitably subjects of male voyeurism and exploitation. The contextual backdrop of the Japanese occupation further situates the objectification of women within a larger narrative of colonial consumption, which may form a political comment on the masculine appetite for possession of foreign territories. Hence, the film invites its audience to reconsider established narratives through a queer lens and find new possibilities beyond historical systems of power.