The Paradoxical Home and Body in Jennifer Johnston's The Christmas Tree (1981).

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.