On the Borderlines of Abjection and Jouissance: The North As an Abject in Jennifer Johnston's the Gingerbread Woman (Critical Essay‪)‬

In recent years, Jennifer Johnston's fiction has received significant critical attention, which has changed the perspective on her work. Literary scholars have undertaken new readings of her novels in the light of postcolonial and poststructuralist theories. This article will engage with this growing critical dialogue by applying Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to one of Johnston's later texts, The Gingerbread Woman (2000). The novel explores the major concerns in Johnston's work--female identity, Irish politics, the maternal, and Self-Other relations--yet, it continues to be underdiscussed in criticism. The Gingerbread Woman presents an ambiguous narrative of abjection that troubles both personal and national borders. At the intersection of these borders, Johnston's novel positions a narrative of the North, which surfaces as a hated and polluting object, or an 'abject', in Kristevian terms. Through the process of abjection, in which the North occupies a key position, Johnston's protagonists come to a reconciliation with their private pasts, while also resolving the tension in the self-narratives of the two Irelands that they represent--north and south of the border. What is revealed in this process is the ambiguity of abjection itself, which verges on jouissance, and hence the permeability of borders and boundaries. **********