A girl becoming a Lady Critic:

It has been an ongoing fight for men and women to be looked at as equal. Women fought for voting rights, jobs, equal pay, and more. Female equality has existed always; however, societies norm have tendencies to put things aside and it slowly became overlooked. In most societies, the man goes out and provide for the family while the woman maintains the household. In Metamorphosis, Kafka not only demonstrates specified gender roles in society, he also uses Grete to illustrate how the gender boundary limits growth. A feminist critic could view Grete’s roles before and after as Kafka’s way of promoting balance in gender roles. Gregor’s sister Grete gave illustration to the way society view gender roles and how unbalance things can become. Gregor portrays Grete, in the beginning, as a female that is not superior by using subsidiary terms that suggested her status being less than a man. Kafka uses words such as modest, child, and playing to describe his seventeen year old sister. Kafka writes, “His sister, who at seventeen was still a child, and whose lifestyle up to that point consisted of dressing herself neatly, sleeping late and above all playing the violin.” Gregor’s transformation caused Grete to step up because of Gregor’s inability to work; this changed her gender role as a female. Although her role seemed to only be taking care of her brother, she gained value within the family. Kafka states, “He often heard them praise his sister’s current industry, whereas they had previously complained a great deal about her, as she had then seemed to them a rather idle girl.” This shows equalization in gender roles and how society boundaries can hold back people from success. The author expressed, through Gregor’s crisis, how the norm of gender roles hindered both male and female. Gregor worked himself to his death and Grete became complacent. Grete demonstrated overcoming gender obstacles and showed how beneficial steeping out of the norm can become. I love how Kafka is encouraging people to live outside of the norm for gender roles and set goals without limits.

Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis. Trans. and Ed. Stanley Corngold. New York: Bantam, 1972. Print.