From Competition to Cooperation -- A Feminist Interpretation of The Handmaiden

Abstract

Directed by Park Chan-wook, the Korean film The Handmaiden is adapted from the novel City of Briars by British writer Sarah Waters. It tells the story of money and love between an aristocratic lady who inherits a huge fortune, a deceiving count who covets her property, a maid who is hired by the count to approach the lady, and the lady's guardian during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea in 1930. This paper takes The Handmaiden as the text, Beauvoir's feminist theory in the Second Sex as the perspective, takes two female characters in the film, lady and maid, as samples, discusses the complex relationship formed by two women with completely different backgrounds, and studies how the film expresses the relationship between them from the initial competitive relationship to the relationship of cooperation and synergy. Through the analysis of Park Chan-wook's directing techniques and characteristics, this paper studies the female relationship in the traditional sense of male society, and how the relationship of solidarity, mutual aid, and mutual feelings between women are formed and transformed.