SOURCE: "Three Mysterious Women: Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, Tonka," in Robert Musil, Master of the Hovering Life: A Study of the Major Fiction, Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 105-87.

In the following excerpt, Peters interprets The Lady from Portugal from a psychoanalytic perspective.

The second story [The Lady from Portugal] in the trilogy Three Women is set (as was the first story, Grigia) in a geographical area that is intentionally vague, in a region situated between North and South and in a world at once specifically medieval and yet enveloped in the timelessness of the fairy tale. Generations earlier, the Ketten family had come from the North and stopped, as did Homo, on the threshold of the South near the Brenner pass in Italy. It is in such an ambiguous geographical setting that Musil treats once again the conflict between reason and mysticism. And it is because of...