ABSTRACT
The individual characters in her works are first and foremost seen in terms of their relationship to the family, past and present. The fate of the individual woman and man is inextricably woven together with that of the family The attempt to separate oneself, to create a life on one's own, always fails and eventually leads to death. In her portraits of women and men, Jolsen is guided by a firm belief in nineteenth-century notions of determinism and power of sexual instincts. It is especially women who represent ancestral heritage in her writing and who are always solitary figures, hypersensitively connected to nature, never able to cross over to the larger human collective. Openly sensual, dreaming, and erotic, they fall in love with men who are capable of satisfying their sexual needs. But their love-ideal collides not only with the norms but also with itself; the men they love (physically) are not the men they can respect. Jolsen's female figures exist in the border areas between dream and reality Their lives are marked by broken illusions. They are torn between responsible, loyal husbands, and attractive, somewhat demonic, but in the end weak, lovers.
