Venus in Furs and the Woman on the Wall

We’ve discussed Gregor’s submissiveness to his family many times; he seems to totally acquiesce to whatever they desire, without consideration for his own health or happiness. It is my hypothesis that this submissiveness extends beyond the Samsa family dynamic, and in fact infests every facet of his being, and that this is a deliberate choice made by Kafka.

What led to to this conclusion was the inclusion of the detail of Gregor’s favorite picture. The only object that seems to garner any kind of emotional/sexual response, it is simply of a ‘woman in furs’. We discussed the possibility of it being a pinup or otherwise desirable woman; I think it’s safe to assume that she’s meant to be beautiful and that it is for her that Gregor feels the closest thing to attraction that we see displayed throughout the story.

This isn’t the first time in literature that a man named Gregor has taken a liking to a beautiful woman dressed in furs. When I read that passage, it immediately called to mind Venus in Furs, a novel written in 1870 by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (‘Masoch’ as in ‘Masochism’). It features a young nobleman who falls in love with a woman (the titular ‘Venus in Furs’) and asks to be taken as her slave. Critically, he takes the name Gregor, which may have been a traditional Russian servant's name; I say ‘may have’ because Wikipedia said so, but I couldn’t find any trustworthy academic sources that agreed. (Then again, I didn’t exactly have much luck in finding any sources at all when I searched ‘history of the name Gregor’, so I didn’t necessarily find anything that contradicted it either.)

It might be a long shot, but I believe that it’s possible that Kafka intended to evoke this novel to further characterize Gregor as being totally submissive in every aspect of his life. The fact that The Metamorphosis is about a man so submissive that he is willing to die essentially because his family is ashamed of him, and his name is that protagonist's slave persona, and the same image of the beautiful woman in furs is present as the object of sexual attraction, leads me to believe that Kafka fully intended to make the connection. The thing about Sacher-Masoch’s Gregor is that he chooses to be a slave; he willingingly puts himself in that position. Kafka’s Gregor arguably made a similar choice, albeit excluding the official contract that Sacher-Masoch’s Gregor has.

Through this seemingly minor detail, we see the degree to which Gregor has accepted his 'lower' position in life. Gregor has no desire to lead, to make decisions; he merely accepts what is given, done, and said to him. This extends past just the realms of home and work, comprising a core part of his being.

My proposal is that Kafka may have intended Gregor Samsa as something of an exaggeration of the typical office worker he would have encountered (and perhaps would have been) in his life as an insurance salesman. As such, he made sure that every detail of Gregor’s life reflected his internal bug-y-ness and passivity, including his romances, to drive home the point that his transformation was not a random occurrence, but rather a natural extension of his preexisting nature. Further, The Metamorphosis can be therefore interpreted as a greater criticism of labor and work culture during this time, and the ways in which it demands complete and total submissiveness.

What do you think? Did Kafka mean to evoke Sacher-Masoch? If so, what are the implications?