Cursed Bunny: Stories

The opening stories in this collection both revolve around unplanned pregnancies, showing how these events derail the lives of the women who have them. Despite their similarity in subject, the stories take vastly different narrative approaches to arrive at complex truths about the experiences of womanhood and motherhood.

The speculative elements of “The Head” function as an allegory for Societal Expectation as a Tool of Patriarchy—specifically interrogating the systems of control that deny women agency over their own bodies. The book was originally published in 2017, just two years before abortion was decriminalized in South Korea in 2019. When the story was written, avenues for getting a safe abortion in the country were still extremely limited. The head stakes a claim on the woman as a product of her body, arguing that she has a responsibility to care for it and ultimately to sacrifice her life to it even though she never chose to engender it. In this way, the head allegorizes the damaging effects of anti-abortion laws that deny women autonomy over their bodies.

The head is characterized by two defining characteristics: its relationship to the woman, whom it sees as its mother, and its perception as “waste.” The latter characteristic forces the mother to repeat the act of disposing the head, which she never chose to create and thus wants to keep out of her life. The recurrence of this act emphasizes the pressure and guilt the woman is made to feel for committing to her choice. Conversely, the people in the woman’s life have neutral opinions toward the presence of the head, but virtually no sympathy for the effect it has on the woman’s well-being. When the woman quits her job for fear of the head’s impact on her ability to work, the woman’s family advise her to find a husband. By contrast, when the head is found by others, like the janitor and the woman’s own daughter, they immediately take pity on it and return it to the toilet.

The scope of this story stretches all the way to the woman’s middle age. As she gets older, the woman becomes increasingly isolated from her family, especially as her daughter goes on to live her own life in college and her husband retreats to work to escape their passionless marriage. Without her career, the woman has been relegated to a domestic life that loses its meaning without her family around her, resulting in the empty feeling she tries to suppress. This bleak outcome represents the collateral aim of Social Expectation as a Tool of Patriarchy, relegating the mother to a life of loneliness and obscurity. At this juncture, the head emerges as the younger version of the woman, reflecting all the pity and sympathy that the head received in lieu of the woman. The woman resents the fact that the head has stolen her youth from her. In turn, the head’s rebuttals show how the woman’s feelings reflect those of many women who become mothers anyway, but feel entitled to the gratitude of their children for everything they’ve done for them.

“The Embodiment” similarly drives themes of patriarchy by interrogating the social expectation that single pregnant mothers need fathers to help them raise their children. The obstetrician asserts—as a matter of medical certainty—that the fetus will not develop properly without a father. The consequences of failing to meet this imperative are purposefully left ambiguous throughout the story, so that Young-lan has the narrative agency to decide whether a father is really necessary to help the fetus develop. Young-lan’s decision to raise the baby on her own helps underline Resisting Systems of Power and Control as a theme by acknowledging Young-lan’s independence and capability. These qualities are quickly suppressed, however, by reminders of the imperative to find a father. Evidently, the only times men present themselves as candidates for the role of father, they are either a poor match, like the driver and the suitor who quotes Shakespeare to woo her, or have ulterior motives, like the blackmailer and Woochang.

The distraction of Young-lan’s quest prevents her from attending to the physiological needs of her child throughout the pregnancy. She only realizes the need for nutrition once her water breaks, which is a more rational explanation for the lack of fetal development than the absence of a father. Young-lan’s desperation to find a father among the paramedics reflects her panic over failing to nourish the fetus. She figures that if she can at least fulfill the less logical conditions of her pregnancy, it may be a step toward securing the baby’s safe delivery.

The driver’s reappearance at the end is a half-hearted attempt to do the right thing, as he remains reluctant to accept the role of “father” and offers to be a “guardian” instead. By then, Young-lan is already grieving the loss of her child, even if it wasn’t something she ever actively wanted. She feels guilty because she gave it too little, but this guilt arises from the same system of patriarchal oppression she has been enmeshed in all along, beginning with the doctor who blamed her for her unwanted pregnancy and then demanded that she turn her life upside down to meet the fetus’s supposed needs. Everyone in the narrator’s life has confirmed for her, throughout the story, that her purpose is to be a mother and that she is always already failing at that purpose no matter what she does. The maternal guilt she feels at the end of the story is the product of that societal pressure.