Decadent Women Telling Nations Differently: The Finnish Writer L. Onerva and her Motherless Dilettante Upstarts
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This chapter focuses on the Finnish writer L. Onerva’s strategies to construct female subjectivity within the framework of the decadent mode on the one hand, and the ‘New Woman discourse’ on the other, developed in the context of the Finnish national awakening, in which the late 19th and early 20th century the turn of the 19th and the 20th century Finnish writers lived and operated. L. Onerva was a Finnish language writer, who was supposed to take part, in one way or another, in the ‘Finnish national project’, but, as one of the most international cultural figures of her generation, producing fiction, poetry, literary and art criticism as well as numerous translations (mostly from French), she was regarded by some as ‘too cosmopolitan’. She was concerned with women’s emancipation as well as with its problematization, being much closer to the artistic circles enchanted with decadence, Nietzscheanism and other fin-de-siècle trends, accused by many of ‘misogyny’, than to the mainstream Finnish women’s movement, characterized by adherence to patriotism and Christian (Lutheran) moral values.