Abstract
Jennifer Johnston’s fiction presents the conditions of Irish culture and society by exploring the separations between interior and exterior realms and past and present temporalities persisting within the insulating privacy of the familial home space. In The Christmas Tree (1981), the home is both haven and prison for Johnston’s heroine. In this paper, I argue that the home—which assumes the form of the individual body and the familial home—is paradoxical. The protagonist leaves 1950s Ireland because of the country’s rigid gender roles in order to pursue an autonomous life as a writer in England, but she is unable to publish her writing within the confines of the patriarchal publishing world. The home of her body becomes paradoxical when she becomes a single mother as an avenue for creativity but is then diagnosed with terminal cancer. She returns to her father’s home to die, which she re-orders and reclaims through the disorder of the uncanny—represented by her non-conformity and illness brought into the patriarchal home. By writing her life story and creating a brief, alternative maternal relationship with her young caretaker, the protagonist confronts her own ambivalence toward her parents, who also represent aspects of oppressive heteronormative gender expectations.
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Endnotes
1 The term “Big House” refers to large estate houses that were owned by the landed class, also known as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class, in pre-Revolutionary Ireland. To the Irish working classes, these houses became symbolic representations of social, economic, and political domination. As a result, many of these structures were destroyed during the Irish Revolutionary Period (1912–1923).
2 Dublin 4 is considered one of Dublin’s most prestigious districts.
3 The present time of the novel takes place in 1978.
4 For further discussion on Johnston’s use of chronology and narrative organization within The Christmas Tree, see St. Peter (2000).
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Slivka, J.A. The Paradoxical Home and Body in Jennifer Johnston’s The Christmas Tree (1981). J Med Humanit 44, 91–105 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-022-09760-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-022-09760-3