Come Down to a Lower Place – a Lovecraftian Korean tale about the oppression of female workers and their bodies
The writings of H.P. Lovecraft have seen a renewal of interest in recent years, despite the fact that he was a well-known racist and xenophobe. Writing in the early 20th century, he imagined monsters that gave form to fear of difference.
Creatures like Cthulhu, probably his best-known and most borrowed invention, effectively challenge human complacency about our place in the world as the most powerful species. Lovecraft describes Cthulhu as a “huge, formless white polypous thing; a "squid-head with writhing feelers” that inhabits the lost city of R’lyeh, described as “nothing of this or of any sane planet”.
His story The Call of Cthulhu recounts a documented history of human encounters with the monster that lead only to madness and death. Such monsters, and their strange domains, led the philosopher Graham Harman to coin the term “weird realism” to describe Lovecraft’s oeuvre.
Lovecraft’s stories also reveal his fear of women and the horror he saw in their capacity to give birth to the thing he perhaps feared above all – a hybrid race that would put an end to white supremacy. As Lovecraft expert Carl Sederholm has noted, Lovecraft’s stories abound with “creatures that ooze, pulsate and drip mostly from below the waist”.
It is this fear of women’s bodies and the attendant racism and misogyny bound up in it that is confronted in the recently published novella Come Down To A Lower Place by Seoyoung Yi. The novella is part of the Lovecraft Reanimated project by UK-based publisher Honford Star, in which leading Korean speculative fiction writers reimagine the works of Lovecraft.
The novel opens with Lee Seul, a team leader at Yukwang Construction, worrying about her vaginal discharge and struggling with a UTI (urinary tract infection). Seul has been tasked with investigating a smell seeping up from the basement of a prestigious department store, threatening the carefully curated ambience of the luxury goods department on the first floor. The plans for the original construction during the colonial era hint at something sinister.
The stinking slime that oozes from the basement heralds the arrival of Bin-o-Jae, a Lovecraftian monster formed from the despair of countless women subjected to misogynistic violence. It’s been created from such experiences as the suppressed pain of generations of female workers denied the breaks necessary to change their sanitary pads during their periods – “their knees twisting under bright lights, as they waited for a chance to go to the bathroom”.
Department stores in colonial Korea were known for propagating the emotional labour identified by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart (1983). Like the flight attendants that Hochschild examined, female store attendants were expected to smile constantly and endure rude and dismissive customer attitudes without complaint.
In research published in 2018, social scientists Jinseok Oh and Howard Kahm reported on the case of Paek Inbong, a worker at the Hwasin Department Store in Seoul. In 1938, after constant bullying by her manager, Inbong took an overdose of sleeping pills. Talking about the experience, she said:
“[The manager] started scolding me for fidgeting and kept going until I could hardly breathe. I thought it would be better to die than to suffer like this. In order to show the agony felt by the employees, I decided to die.”
In exploring this kind of territory, Come Down To A Lower Place is unashamedly political. It espouses a return to the socialist feminism promoted by social theorists Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, who argued for a recognition of gender roles and their expression in heteropatriarchal (straight and male-dominated) institutions, like marriage, as essential to the perpetuation of capitalism.
Yi’s book is certainly born of Korea’s 4B movement, a feminist movement with four tenets all of which start with “bi” (no) in Korean – bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating) and bisekseu (no sex). Drawing on this, the book makes the case for women’s power to withdraw their labour, both as workers in the consumer economy and as wives and mothers.
Yi’s Bin-o-jae stands for the accumulation of frustration and anxiety that gave rise to 4B and for the liberatory potential of women’s anger. This monster has been waiting impatiently for a woman like Lee Seul, to unleash its power on the world, which, Yi hints, it plans to do on her wedding day.
Bin-o-jae is, like Cthulhu, squid-like and huge with writhing tentacles, described as not “gray like a squid’s” but “more like a piece of mammalian flesh – massive, red and covered in slime”. Equally, like Cthulhu, it defies full description as it partially emerges from the depths below the department store, hinting at further horrors to be revealed. However, its effects are quite different.
While Lovecraft’s protagonists succumb to madness, chronic fevers and suicide, Seul, at the end, embraces Bin-o-jae and, “despite the pain … throughout her body … strangely [feels] at peace”. As Seul is fitted for her wedding dress, she struggles to contain the monster that now fully inhabits her body and she promises it “just a little longer” before she releases it upon the world.
Lovecraft’s legacy therefore entails a somewhat delicious irony in this book. Bin-o-jae is Cthulhu repurposed to draw attention to women’s very real pain and the potential power of unleashing their anger in collective action.
As Yi demonstrates, poking the monster doesn’t always lead to horror and death; it may just lead you to the power you need to win the fight.
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Debra Benita Shaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.