Decadent New Woman’s Ironic Subversions: L. Onerva’s Multi-layered Irony

Abstract

<p>The decadent New Woman novel <i>Mirdja </i>(1908) by the Finnish writer L. Onerva (Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882–1972) is permeated by irony. From the point of view of the eponymous heroine, the conservative bourgeois strata of the <i>fin de siècle </i>Finnish society with their nationalist zeal, their lack of understanding of art, as well as their hypocritical veneration of the ordinary country folk, are ironized in the novel. However, at the same time, ironic gaze is cast to decadent bohemians and their hom(m)osexual bonding, to male aesthetes who indulge in decadent effeminacy and “gender parasitism”, but despise women. The eponymous heroine, an aspiring artist, tries to appropriate the ironic, objectifying gaze of the decadent aesthete, but she is herself ironized by various narrative voices, characterized by the typically decadent dissonance, contrasts, paradox and ambivalence.</p><p>

</p><p>I am going to show how, in <i>Mirdja, </i>irony, ludic, parodic repetition and e/Echoing function as devices of constructing the decadent female subject, oscillating between various types of acting and masquerading, and being confronted with ethical and political aspects of the surrounding world. I will look at the narrative irony in the text, as well as at ways in which the text ironizes various literary strategies, figures, motifs, ideas and whole genres, intertwining the rhetoric devices of irony with that of parody and intertextuality, so typical of the decadent mode. I am going to show how the multiple ironic voices as well as various levels and hierarchies of irony subvert each other and are supported by the devices of decadent poetics. </p>