AMBIVALENT TOWARD FEMINISM, fearing that women would lose sight of their sensual and erotic sides in their pursuit of careers, Andreas-Salomé also recognized that patriarchal society had not been particularly successful at encouraging women to accept their sexuality and sensuality unless it could be channeled into and tamed within marriage. In Das Haus, as we have seen, Gitta's flirtation with a Greek man strikes fear into the heart of her parents, who immediately consent to her marriage to Markus, a Jew of whom they had previously disapproved. The fear of the untamed or inadequately domesticated woman and her uncontained sexuality that Andreas-Salomé touches on in Das Haus forms the focus of Jutta. Written at about the same time as Fentischka and Eine Ausschweifung (1898), Jutta too reflects both its era's intensified public discourse on women's issues and that period's challenges to narrative convention and tradition. It resembles Eine Ausschweifung and Fenitschka in that it too demonstrates the subtlety with which Andreas-Salomé manipulated narrative structure to expose the limitations imposed on women's psychological and sexual development by conventional definitions.

Critical interest in Andreas-Salomé has concentrated on Fenitschka and Eine Ausschweifung and focused above all on the theme of female sexual identity that they address, often indicating as it does so how those texts employ literary structures in sophisticated and interesting ways in order to explore and criticize prevailing images of woman and prevailing ideologies having to do with woman's nature and sexuality.