The article
claims there is a recurrent trope in the Finnish 1910s fiction that marks the
limit of the legible and the normal, on one hand, and their queer outside, on
the other: that of making a spectacle out of there being limits to the stories
that can be told. In the article, variations of the trope are called spectacles of silence. Such spectacles
are located in three different texts, a play by a working-class author Elvira
Willman from 1917, a novel by a highly canonised poet Eino Leino from 1912, and
a short story from a nearly-forgotten author Selma Anttila. It is argued that
the spectacle of silence-trope functions through making us alert to the fact
that there may be all kinds of things going on outside of our field of vision
we know nothing about. It does not illustrate the outside, just makes us
queerly aware that an outside might exist.

Furthermore, the article suggests that it is important
to approach the 1910s Finnish litearature is from a queer perspective, as this
was a decade of imagining Finnish citizenship into being: in 1906, new
parliamentary legislation turned every Finn into a representative of their
nation overnight, and all citizens old enough, regardless of gender or
profession, could vote and run for parliament. The first modern parliament was
elected in 1907, even if all real power still resided in Russia for the next
ten years until Finland gained its independence in 1917. Literature written
between these years was an important platform for reimagining citizenship and
the implicit rules of performing it successfully. Therefore, it can also help
us track the mechanisms through which we came to equate certain versions of
straightness with mature, responsible citizenship.