While we’ve discussed Gregor and his family a lot in class, we haven’t discussed the charwoman very much so I would like to explore her character a bit. I didn’t know what a charwoman is so I looked it up. According to the OED a charwoman is “a woman hired by the day to do odd jobs of household work.” The thing that stood out the most to me about the charwoman was the fact that she routinely directly addressed Gregor. From page 99: “At first she used to call him over to her as well, with words that were probably meant to be friendly, such as: ‘Come along, then, my old dung-beetle!’ or ‘Look at our old dung-beetle, now!’” The only other times anyone directly addresses Gregor in the book are before anybody knows that he’s transformed and when when his sister curses him with “You! Gregor!” It seemed weird to me that the charwoman, who may not have even been told that the insect Gregor used to be a human Gregor, treats Gregor more humanly than his family. I don’t think that