What Makes It Neo-Victorian?: The Handmaiden and the Double Internalisation of Cultural Colonisation

Abstract

This article investigates the way in which The Handmaiden (2017), a South-Korean adaptation of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002), provides a way of considering neo-Victorian adaptation in the globalised context. Although set in Korea under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s, the film indirectly refers in the background to traces of Victorian Britain. Replacing Fingersmith's class conflict with the cultural conflict between Japan and Korea, The Handmaiden represents the intricate process of cultural colonisation. Korean society in the 1930s is depicted in the film as doubly indebted to Victorian British and Japanese culture, for Japan modernised the country through absorbing Western culture in the late nineteenth century. The influence of Victorian Britain, a looming presence in the background of The Handmaiden, reveals how Victorian culture resonates in a country distant from Britain in a different time period. The Handmaiden serves to globalise the definition of the term ‘(neo)Victorian’ by shedding light on the influence of Victorian Britain in the Korean society of the 1930s. The Handmaiden's unique way of bringing together Victorian Britain and the regional politics of 1930s Northeast Asia serves to widen the range of neo-Victorian imaginations.