The criticism of the village community and the destructive effects on the individual of the austere faith is most evident in the portrait of Mira, one of the women. The two central characters of the text are women and they are fundamentally different. Gender issues, too, play an important part in the thesis, especially in the section analyzing the main characters and the attitudes they represent. This interpretation deviates from the idea of pure civilization criticism and of the near idealization of the world described, which has dominated earlier analyses of the Aronsons work. What becomes especially apparent is a striking ambivalence towards modernity, but also towards a more traditional, almost pre-modern, attitude to life prevailing in the severe Læstadianist village community described. The thematization of individual freedom versus determinism makes the work a counterpart to existentialism, the current philosophy of the time. The basis of this thematic analysis consists of entities like language, time, faith and individuality, all of which play an important part in Aronsons writing.
In the next step the modernist approach is linked to a discussion of modernity. These aspects, and the originality with which they are treated by Aronson, are put in relation to modernist æstheticism. This work forms the subject of the first part, with formal aspects like narrator construction, composition and genre as the starting-point. This thesis discusses the narrative art of the Swedish author Stina Aronson (1892-1956) with special emphasis on Hitom himlen (This Side of Heaven) from 1946.
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