The decadent New Woman novel Mirdja (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 fin de siècle 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.
I am going to show how, in Mirdja, 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
