The Handmaiden released in 2016 by director Chan-wook Park and screenwriter Seo-Kyung Jung is a cinematic adaptation of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian lesbian crime novel, Fingersmith (2002), to Korea during Japanese rule. Both works tell the story of two women, the lady and the maid, and their growth through exploration of female (homo)sexuality and struggles against phallocentric pornography. This paper aims to analyze the feminist politics in the novel and the film from a queer perspective to assess to what extent representations of lesbians and lesbianism anticipate a queer literary vision, which decenters and subverts heteropatriarchy for alternative imaginations of queer living. In order to achieve this goal, I conduct a comparative study focusing on their distinctly different resolutions of these two texts. I conclude that Fingersmith’s ending where Maud repossesses the ruins of the patriarchal house and writes lesbian pornography opens up possibilities for queer interpretations of lesbian subjectivity and queer subversion. On the contrary, The Handmaiden provides a seemingly “happy” dead-end for Hideko and Sook-hee because it romanticizes lesbianism and the fantasy of gynotopia.