Intro
For those of you not familiar with Kafka's disturbing story, The Metamorphosis is the story of an ordinary, young man, Gregor Samsa, who awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a bug. That's right. You heard us. A bug (a beetle-like thing, to be exact). And you thought Frankenstein's monster had a freaky body.
So, all right. No disease or injury is going to turn you into a bug—unless of course you're Peter Parker and you happen to get bitten by a radioactive spider. But we digress.
But The Metamorphosis has a whole lot to teach us about the way our bodies in the modern era are perceived and how they are treated. At its core, The Metamorphosis condemns the forces of industrialization, which turn workers into little more than drones, their bodies not much more than cogs in the industrial machine.
This is precisely the case with poor Gregor. He's not a factory worker, but his job ensures that those factories keep on running. That's because he's a traveling salesman, hocking those wares that keep modern industry in business.
And it's a pretty cruddy job: Gregor is constantly traveling. He's tired. His body hurts (we're talking bumpy, muddy roads, trains, and carriages—no traveling first class here). And his mind is restless and bored. After all, pitching textiles is not exactly mentally stimulating. Gregor's job is probably about as much fun as a root canal.
So why does he do it? Simple. He has a family to support. And we're not talking wife and kids. We're talking parents and a sister, each of whom, though physically well, seems to be simply unprepared for life in this new modern world (Kafka was writing in the early-20th century, when the genteel life of the Victorian era was shattered by World War I and the rapid social changes of an industrialized Europe).
While the rest of Gregor's family seemed more suited to tea parties and piano playing in the drawing room, it fell to Gregor to sacrifice body, spirit, and mind in a seemingly endless cycle of work just to ensure his family's survival. That is, until he turned into a bug. After all, who wants to buy linen from a beetle?
Quote
The chief clerk now raised his voice, "Mr. Samsa," he called to him, "what is wrong? You barricade yourself in your room, give us no more than a yes or no for an answer, you are causing serious and unnecessary concern to your parents and you fail—and I mention this just by the way—you fail to carry out your business duties in a way that is quite unheard of. I'm speaking here on behalf of your parents and of your employer, and really must request a clear and immediate explanation. I am astonished, quite astonished. I thought I knew you as a calm and sensible person, and now you suddenly seem to be showing off with peculiar whims. This morning, your employer did suggest a possible reason for your failure to appear, it's true—it had to do with the money that was recently entrusted to you.
Analysis
Here's a pretty rockin'—if creepy—example of Lennard Davis' theories about the emergence of l'homme moyen, the average man. As we saw, Davis theorizes that population or social statistics emerged in the mid- to late-19th century to identify those mental and physical characteristics that create the best workers.
As a result, individual bodies become little more than numbers, an accumulation of averages designed to create the most productive workforce. When the clerk comes to Gregor's home to learn why Gregor hasn't reported to work, he does so not out of concern for Gregor, but out of concern for the business. Gregor's body no longer meets the standard for functioning and appearance that is required of the good, middle class worker in the modern industrial era.
As we've seen, Foucault has argued that the development of the modern subject, the sense of self-identity we embrace in the modern era, is really an endeavor to prop up the status quo, to ensure that power structures remain in check, by ensuring that citizens' bodies are standardized, stable, and interchangeable. When one body (worker, soldier, or student) doesn't work, just replace it with another one.
Non-normative bodies are "disabled" because they aren't uniform; they can't be standardized to look or behave like all the others, nor can they be interchanged with all the others. And so they must be excluded.
Much like the cure/cover/kill model, Gregor's suddenly extraordinary body makes him useless in our modern industrial world. He is no longer financially or social productive, and so he is hidden away—covered—until (spoiler alert) he dies.