This study examines the love and desire between Angela von Pahlen and Stanny Landborg in Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s Fröknarna von Pahlen series. I have studied the characters in Krusenstjerna’s texts using Judith Butler’s theory of the heterosexual matrix. My main focus has been the desire in Fröknarna von Pahlen. Drawn from the primary question, “What is love?”, I examine the desires possibilities and obstacles.

The essay is divided into two parts. In the first part I read Fröknarna von Pahlen against its contemporary view on homosexuality. I have found both an awareness of the contemporary view but also a tendency to surpass this view, go beyond it in order to create something new. In the second part of the essay I focus on the relationship between the two young girls, Angela and Stanny, and a few other characters close to them. The desire in Krusenstjernas texts reaches an almost universal level, it is written as the same irrespective of between what or who it is expressed. The characters are however also always subject to culture and society which is dominated by the heterosexual matrix. Its rules for sexuality are embodied in different ways, through actions or thoughts, and are constantly present.

The novels use both the hetero-normative model for love and the ones the heterosexual matrix rules out as unwanted. But through repeating these models differently the text becomes a subversive instrument in the deconstruction of the heterosexual matrix. By means of applying a lyrical tone to the text and by putting the “divergent” love in a secluded place Agnes von Krusenstjerna brings her text to something new and bends the rules for what desire and love are allowed to be.