Such a marginal position offers them a vantage from which to reflect with scorn and sorrow on the erotic theater in which men and women like themselves have been obliged to perform. There are two passages, a brief one from Ulrich’s perspective (he is the less conscious of the two, at least at this juncture) and a longer one from Agathe’s point of view, that are worth reading in tandem as mutually mirroring ethnographic descriptions of the stage directions by which the European bedroom dramas of their time were played out. It seems that men experienced sexual love as an opportunity to either enjoy “a hunter’s delight” in amorous conquest or else grant themselves “an hour of weakness” in a variety of performance styles that strike Agathe “as cheaply melodramatic and overdone, since she had at no time ever felt herself to be other than weak in a world so superbly constructed by the strength of men.” It is an exhausted and exhausting game for both of them.

“Sooner or later,” Ulrich prophesies, “there will come an age of simple sexual companionship, where boy and girl will stand, like-minded and perplexed, before an old heap of broken springs that once drove the mechanisms called Man and Woman!”

•

Late in the book we are introduced to two men who are far from being players in the jousts of love. Both have a strong interest in Agathe, and both, it turns out, are experts in educational theory, one of them “progressive and forward-looking,” the other a pietistic conservative fiercely opposed to his colleague’s liberal views.

The first is Gottlieb Hagauer. The reader has been aware of him all along, mainly through Agathe’s and Ulrich’s uncharitable opinion of him. Now, in a single chapter, we get to know him from within, so to speak, as the understandably aggrieved husband of a wife who, with no forewarning and for no declared reason, is letting him know through a curt missive from her brother, whom Hagauer dislikes, that she wants a divorce. It is a devastating portrait, not least because Musil does not appear to be satirizing him. He is a prototype of conscientious mediocrity so justified in his self-conceit that he cannot imagine why Agathe might have cause for dissatisfaction and concludes, in a carefully reasoned chain of reflection that goes off to Agathe in a letter, that she is “socially feebleminded” and for that reason not fit to live without his protection.

The second exemplar of male authority is Professor August Lindner, whom Agathe meets by chance after fleeing Ulrich’s house with the intention of killing herself, and in whom she believes to have found a paragon of empathy capable, perhaps, of helping her to close the gap between herself and the fullness of love that Ulrich’s dialectics seem unable to deliver. Where Hagauer is merely pathetic and self-righteous, Lindner, goaded by sexual excitement that he cannot admit into his puritanical worldview, becomes a character both sympathetic and ridiculous. Both men are Kantian automatons, models of duty-bound rectitude and probity. They are epitomes of “men with qualities,” completely entrapped in their social personas and professional identities.