SOURCE: "Images of Woman in Musil's Tonka: Mystical Encounters and Borderlines between Self and Other," in The Michigan Academician, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, Winter, 1992, pp. 369-81.

In the following excerpt focusing on Tonka, Mabee discusses the women in Musil's novellas, arguing that their association with nature and imagination makes them "catalysts for illumination" and "mirrors to the male protagonists' fragmented selves in the post-enlightenment world with its emphasis on scientific formulation."

Recalling to consciousness a rationally inexplicable episode of his youth, the nameless young scientist in Robert Musil's Tonka, the third novella in his trilogy Drei Frauen (Three Women, 1924), encounters woman as the Other. As narrator-protagonist, distancing himself in a third-person narratorial style, he ponders the effects of his friendship with the mysterious, simple servant girl Tonka. The streamof-consciousness narrative unfolds in retrospect as the narrator's confrontation with himself and his memories of events surrounding his affair...