SOURCE: "Transforming Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis" in Signs, Vol. 14, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 651-67.

In the following essay, Straus offers a feminist reading of The Metamorphosis that explores the central importance of Gregor's sister, Grete Samsa, in the work.

In 1977 there were already ten thousand works on Franz Kafka in print,¹ nearly all of them written by men. The reasons for scholars' interest in Kafka, particularly his short masterpiece, Metamorphosis, reflect a recognition on the part of students of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social criticism, Marxism, and literature that Kafka's work is inexhaustible. No single interpretation invalidates or finally delivers the story's significance. Its quality of multivalency (Vieldeutigkeit) keeps us talking to each other, against each other, and to ourselves. For fifty years Kafka's work has been seeding thought and precluding that closure of discourse that would imprison us in our old histories. Yet until 1980, gender-based theories and feminist...