ABSTRACT
Viola Parente-Čapková discusses the novel Mirdja (1908) by the Finnish author L. Onerva and its poetics and politics of place. An aspiring artist and a decadent New Woman, Mirdja is most at home in the city, the typically decadent milieu, where she feels both free and constrained by the homosocial circles of male bohemians. Yet she also journeys to wild natural spaces, and even the countryside. She ends her search in a bog, which, eventually, acquires the meaning of the decadent female subject’s intermediate state. These images foreground the gendered nature of the Nordic processes of urbanization and of intertwining natural spaces and landscapes with the national ideology.
