Reading Across Time: A Reflection After Women’s Day

 Yesterday was International Women’s Day, and it left me reflecting on two novels I read about a year apart: The Vegetarian by Han Kang and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

Different eras, different cultures — yet both explore what happens when a woman quietly withdraws from the expectations placed upon her.

Reading them was less about comparison and more about perspective.

Esther’s struggle in The Bell Jar reflects a time when many life paths for women felt narrow and predetermined. Looking back from the present, it is difficult not to feel a certain gratitude for the choices many women today can take for granted — the ability to pursue education, shape careers, delay or reconsider traditional roles, and claim greater autonomy over one’s own life.

Yeong-hye in The Vegetarian, however, resonates differently. Her story unfolds within a social environment where deviation from norms becomes difficult to absorb. Even today, across parts of East Asian societies, her quiet resistance still feels uncomfortably plausible — not necessarily as an individual failing, but as a reflection of how strongly social expectations can continue to shape personal lives.

Yet these novels are not simply about struggle.

They also remind us how literature sharpens our awareness of the present — of the freedoms we may sometimes overlook, and of the contexts that still shape women’s lives across cultures and generations.

For me, reading these two books a year apart became a quiet form of reflection: not to compare myself with either character, but to better notice the time I live in, the choices I have, and the support I should be grateful for.

Not comparison.

Just perspective.