Abstract
Reading the written and film versions of Isak Dinesen’s ‘Babette’s Feast’ together, as texts in dialogue, offers deeper insight into this religious refugee parable and the spiritually rooted friendship, or sisterhood-philia, between its three central female characters. This is a relationship that is often overlooked by critics. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s thoughts about friendship, particularly his observation that there has been a ‘double exclusion of the feminine’ from the historical and philosophical canon, in this article I argue that, through comparative close reading of the 1950 short story and the 1987 film of the Babette story, both Dinesen and film director Gabriel Axel contribute narratives that challenge the male centred tradition which has historically silenced the possibility of friendship between women.
Introduction
Karen Blixen (1937) is best known outside Denmark and the Scandinavian canon for Out of Africa, her memoir of life in colonial Kenya between the world wars, which inspired the 1985 Academy Award–winning film directed by Sidney Pollack and sparked renewed interest in her work during the 1980s. Although she wrote under several nom de plumes, this article refers to her as Isak Dinesen, the male name under which her short story ‘Babette’s Feast’ was first published in America in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1950. A film adaptation directed by Gabriel Axel (1987) was released in 1987 and won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Danish). Reconsidering Dinesen’s ‘Babette’s Feast’ nearly 50 years later is timely, as the story continues to speak powerfully to contemporary concerns such as the refugee crisis and the ethics of hospitality.
Dinesen’s work frequently explores women’s entrapment, exile, dislocation, and (be)longing–themes rooted in both her fiction and personal life–yet she also dismantles these conditions by portraying women with agency and voice. In the Babette story, this has often been overlooked, especially in conventional readings that frame the two pious Scandinavian sisters as oppressed by patriarchy and religion, emblematic of sexual repression, unfulfilled desire, and limited ambition (Branson, 2000; Gossman, 1963; Mullins, 1994), with Babette positioned as their sensual, liberating French foil.
Such readings are interesting and valid, but also reductive. Through comparative close analysis of the 1950 short story and the 1987 film, I argue here that the subtext of sisterhood–understood as a radical, regendered form of philia or brotherhood, signifying loving friendship and kinship–is central to the narrative. Read this way, the sisters emerge as agentic figures who command their lives and voices despite the apparent austerity of their chosen existence. Their lived sisterhood embodies spiritual values of non-violence, peace, hospitality, kinship, acceptance, and care, shifting attention away from later feminist and more overt politicised notions of sisterhood, towards a more practical, relational ethic grounded in everyday life. Beneath the story’s eschatological framework of spiritual reward after death lie themes of redemption and transformation in this life. Babette transcends her trauma through inclusion in a sustaining community of care, while the sisters, having foregone eros-love, are rewarded through philia-love: companionship, friendship, and sisterhood.
Dinesen’s original text, like much of her fiction, adopts a lyrical, mythical, mystical, and almost biblical style and a tone akin to fables or scriptural parables in which characters appear symbolic or archetypal, often representative of certain vices, virtues, values, or ideals. While such readings remain valid, a deeper, more nuanced reading reveals that the narrative also contains subtle details that render the three women complex and multidimensional; not merely stereotypes or stock characters. In this article I follow Dinesen’s textual clues and examine how Axel’s later film both builds upon and reshapes Dinesen’s original story, proposing a richer interpretation of the radical sisterhood-philia at the story’s core. Read in this way, both Dinesen and Axel offer narratives that serve as examples of female friendship, rather than, as Martha Minow notes, merely inscribing female relationships with masculine norms, which are often merely representative of the dominant order (in Schweitzer, 2016). As Ivy Schweitzer (2016: 338–339) argues, a broader history of friendship is needed to challenge androcentric frameworks and to acknowledge female friendship as a significant cultural form. As Schweitzer notes, We need a more comprehensive history of friendship as cultural discourse and ideological tool . . . [in order to] . . . challenge both the dominant understanding of friendship and the androcentric political landscape . . . [and to] acknowledge female friendship as a salient, potentially subversive form of affiliation (Schweitzer, 2016: 338, 339)
I argue that we indeed have an example of this in the ‘Babette’s Feast’ narrative.
Philia and the Erasure of Female Friendship
In his Nicomachean Ethics, based on lectures delivered around 330 BC, Aristotle distinguished different types of love, ranking philia (love between = friendship), alongside agape (unconditional, altruistic, godly love) and philoxenia (hospitality to strangers), above eros (sexual love) and philautia (self-love). Philia is commonly translated as brotherly love or fraternity, signifying kinship, likeness, and reciprocal care. This translation reflects a linguistic tradition in which man equals human, effectively erasing women. As Schweitzer notes (2016: 344), from Aristotle and Cicero onward women were often deemed ‘constitutionally incapable of fully rational appetite-controlling intellect’ and thus unfit for the ‘lofty enterprise’ of friendship, being perceived as weak and dependent on men.
Jacques Derrida identifies a ‘double exclusion of the feminine’ (Derrida, 1993: 383) from the historical and philosophical canon of friendship, which both erases the possibility of friendship between women and privileges homo-fraternal, phallogocentric models that fail to account for the feminine (Derrida, 1993: 388). Schweitzer (2016: 340) notes about the development of friendship discourse through the ages: The modern obsession with individual selfhood and sexual desire has obscured the fact that throughout the ancient world and up through the early modern period, friendship represented the highest ideal of ethical, political, and social development in the human sphere . . . as a voluntary, non-subordinating affiliation, friendship typically implied parity, symmetry, spirituality and self-affirmation through the rational form of desire and free choice rather than hierarchy, physicality and self-loss or self-dilution through irrational and uncontrollable passion or forced alliance.
For Derrida, friendship centres on altruistic loving, rather than being loved, knowing rather than being known, which he terms ‘egalitarian sharing’ (Derrida, 1993: 380). This encompasses ‘compassion, sympathy, consensus . . . desire, request, promise and prayer’, also respect, reciprocity, responsiveness, and responsibility (Derrida, 1993: 367–380). Derrida inverts Cartesian logic by locating subjectivity itself within relationality: I think, therefore I think the other; I think, therefore I need the other (to think); I think, therefore the possibility of friendship lodges itself in the movement of my thoughts insofar as it requires, calls, desires the other, the necessity of the other, the cause of the other at the heart of cogito (Derrida, 1993: 362)
Derrida (1993: 368) privileges friendship over friend, emphasising relation rather than identity, and describes friendship discourse as a form of prayer. This resonates with Dinesen’s narrative and the piety of the Scandinavian community Babette joins after fleeing France, extending the story’s parabolic quality as a meditation on reverence, pacifism, and non-violence. These values stand in contrast to the violence of Babette’s past as a Communard during the 1871 Paris revolt, from which she must flee or face execution.
In contemporary discourse, brotherhood/fraternity is most often associated with monasticism or war. Both are present in the Babette story, through the religious community and Babette’s revolutionary past. As Schweitzer (2016: 341) notes, Aristotle regarded the philia of comrades in battle as the most influential form of friendship, while Mark Kurlansky (2006: 180) and Sebastian Junger (2015) describe how military training fosters loyalty, survival, and deep mutual dependence. Junger (2015) writes of modern veterans: They had an experience of a sort of tribal closeness in their unit when they were overseas. They were eating together, sleeping together, doing tasks and missions together. They were trusting each other with their lives.
Babette’s transition from this type of violent, war-bound brotherhood in Paris during the Communard Revolt to the peaceful, austere sisterhood of Martine and Philippa radically transforms the meaning and practice of philia. From a psychological perspective, Babette may be understood as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), common among (civil) war survivors and combatants. The accepting, cohesive community she finds in Scandinavia with the sisters’ functions as a form of trauma therapy. As Junger (2015) notes, Maybe what determines the rate of long-term PTSD isn’t what happened out there [during war and in combat], but the kind of society you come back to. And maybe if you come back to a close, cohesive, tribal society, you can get over trauma pretty quickly.
What the sisters provide Babette is precisely such a society: an accepting, safe, close, cohesive, tribal society as a replacement for what was lost. Junger (2014) further explains that what veterans often miss is not combat itself but brotherhood: I think what [they] miss[ ] is brotherhood . . . connection to the other men [they were] with. . . . Brotherhood is a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group, you will put the safety of everyone in the group, above your own. In effect, you’re saying, ‘I love these other people more than I love myself’.
Junger (2014, 2015) links the loss of such philia to alienation and high suicide rates among veterans: If you come back to an alienating, modern society, you might remain traumatized your entire life . . . [Veterans] come home and they have to give all that [sense of tribal belonging – philia] up . . . maybe what’s bothering them is actually a kind of alienation. They come home . . . not knowing who they can count on, not knowing who loves them, who they can love, not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it.
Read in this context, the sisterhood-philia Martine and Philippa offer Babette constitutes the highest form of modern trauma therapy: an egalitarian, loving, and sustaining community that enables healing and transformation.
Recovering the Three Women’s Backstories
Babette: Master Chef and Urban Terrorist
In summary, the Babette story recounts the lives of two unmarried Scandinavian sisters, Martine and Philippa, who lead a puritan community of ageing pious Lutherans, and Babette, a mysterious French woman who lives with them as their self-appointed servant. The community was founded by the sisters’ father, long deceased by the time of the eponymous feast, held to mark the centenary of his birth. The feast results from Babette’s insistence on preparing an authentic French meal as a gift to the sisters and their community, who had unconditionally sheltered her 12 years earlier when, on the recommendation of their mutual friend, French opera singer Achille Papin, she fled Paris as a refugee from the violent civil war of the 1871 Communard Revolt. Babette can afford the feast because she has won the French lottery, a sum she ultimately spends entirely on the meal. The narrative’s moment of dramatic insight for the viewer occurs when it is revealed that Babette was once head chef at the prestigious Paris restaurant Café Anglais.
This achievement would have been extraordinary for a woman of her time: Babette would have been the equivalent of a Michelin-star chef today, comparable in renown to figures such as Julia Child, Martha Stewart, or Nigella Lawson. At the feast, General Loren Loewenhielm, a guest and former suitor of Martine, explains that the Café Anglais was run by ‘a person known all over Paris as the greatest culinary genius of the age, and [it was] – most surprisingly – a woman!’ (Dinesen, 2013: 58). This revelation renders Babette’s years of silent service–preparing the community’s austere dried fish and ale-bread porridge–deeply poignant, along with the release of her pent-up culinary artistry in the feast itself.
Only after the feast does Babette reveal her identity to the sisters, declaring, ‘I am a great artist . . . through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!’ (Dinesen 2013: 68). Significantly, Babette is unusually adamant and vocal when she asks to cook the feast, defending both her art and her life’s work, seeking one final chance to do her utmost for those who saved her life and restored her sense of purpose through sisterly acceptance and care. Dinesen (2013: 43) describes this moment vividly, and Sarah Webster Goodwin (1990: 16) aptly observes that Babette persuades the sisters to allow her to cook the feast ‘with the strength of a revolutionary gesture’.
This points to a crucial narrative gap between the short story and the film: Babette’s direct involvement in the 1871 Paris Communard uprising. In Dinesen’s text, Papin’s letter makes clear that Babette fled Paris to escape execution because she had been a pétroleuse–an arsonist, urban guerrilla fighter, and terrorist–during the revolt. This context is entirely absent from Axel’s film. Babette’s complexity lies in the contradiction that, while serving haute cuisine to the Parisian elite, she also ‘helped destroy the people who sustained her art’ (Schwandt, 1993: 161). As she explains to the sisters after the feast: Those people . . . were evil and cruel . . . they oppressed and wronged the poor . . . [but] those people belonged to me, they were mine. They had been brought up and trained . . . to understand the great artist I am. I could make them happy. When I did my best I could make them perfectly happy. (Dinesen, 2013: 68)
Babette’s guilt and complicity in oppression, alongside her grief for her husband and adult son–both executed during the revolt–haunt her during her years of silent service, which function as self-imposed penance. The feast becomes her redemption, confirmed when Philippa embraces her and says, ‘Yet this is not the end! . . . Ah, how you will enchant the angels!’ (Dinesen, 2013: 68).
In the short story, Babette thus arrives as a fully complex, self-contradictory, and agentic subject. The film, by contrast, de-historicises and depoliticises her, weakening the narrative by erasing her inner reckoning with grief, loss, and moral culpability. Aside from a fleeting archival image of executed Communards when Papin’s letter is read, the film offers no substantive account of Babette’s past. She appears largely as a mysterious exile and silent victim of a tragic fate. Although the sisters are shown reading newspapers–challenging the notion of critics that they are naïve or isolated–the execution image remains uncontextualized for the viewer.
As a result, the sisters’ radical act of sheltering Babette appears less dramatic in the film. In the short story, they are aware of her violent past and fearful of its implications for their pacifist home and community. Dinesen (2013: 38) indeed describes them as thinking, about the silent, brooding Babette: ‘a little cold shiver ran through them, and in their hearts, they thought: ‘Perhaps after all she had indeed been a pétroleuse’’. Yet they still decide to shelter her, an extension of love and sisterhood that far exceeds the conventional idea of brotherhood as based on shared likeness and shared interest alone. Papin’s letter to the sisters praises Babette’s ‘resourcefulness, majesty and true stoicism’ (Dinesen, 2013: 34), qualities that equally describe the sisters themselves–independent, highly agentic women who live by their own principles, albeit in apparent contrast to Babette’s overt rebellion and revolt. This shared affinity may explain why Papin sent Babette to them, recognising in each woman something of the others. The story’s power therefore lies in this paradox: despite their apparent differences, the three women are, fundamentally, profoundly alike.
Martine and Philippa: A Blood Bond of Sisterhood and Spiritual Service as Basis for a Greater philia
Babette has often been recognised as a female Christ figure, a familiar narrative and filmic trope (Lane, 1991: 22; Greeley, 2016: 6; Kozlovic, 2000: 56), who redeems the pious community from internal schisms. I use the lower case Christ here to signify the depiction of a redemptive figure like the biblical Jesus, rather than a representation of the actual character or person of Jesus. As Thomas Curry (2012: 12) notes, critics have overemphasised Babette’s redemptive effect on the community while neglecting the equally important redemptive influence of the sisters and their community on Babette–an omission exacerbated when Babette’s backstory is absent, as in the film. Martine and Philippa are arguably the more fundamentally redemptive figures, since it is through their unconditional love and acceptance that Babette is redeemed; without this, her later redemption of the community through the feast would not be possible. Ignoring the sisters’ centrality obscures the significance of the relationship between the women at the narrative’s radical core. It is therefore important to spend some time considering the sisters and their backstories more carefully than has previously been done.
Through their lifelong blood bond of sisterhood, Martine and Philippa can welcome the strange, foreign, and potentially dangerous refugee Babette with selfless compassion. Significantly, the sisters’ names themselves signify friendship, as they were named after Martin Luther and his friend Philip Melanchthon (Dinesen, 2013: 23). Born only a year apart and raised almost as twins, the sisters experience themselves simultaneously as the looking self and the looked at other, seeing and being seen, echoing Derrida’s notion of thinking the self through the other. The film conveys this bond profoundly in silent exchanges of knowing looks–of longing, fear, consternation, worry, and remembrance. This continuously circulating gift of sisterhood enables them to transcend isolation and naturally extend their bond to Babette. The film supports this reading when, after Babette offers to serve them, the sisters refuse her service but invite her to ‘stay with us’, after which, as the short story notes, she remains ‘for twelve years until the time of this tale [of the feast]’ (Dinesen, 2013: 35).
Stephanie Branson’s claim that ‘Martine and Philippa have rejected romantic love, and while they may have loved each other as sisters, they live alone’ (Branson, 2000: 52) underestimates the depth and power of their sisterhood, oversexualising desire but neglecting the spiritual dimension of the sisters’ bond. Although the sisters do not pursue heteronormative marriage, they do not live alone, nor are they depicted as lonely in Dinesen’s text, despite the film arguably encouraging such a reading. They share a depth of communion, intimacy, and care surpassing what their potential romantic relationships could have offered. The men are then indeed drawn as much to the sisters’ spiritual serenity as to their beauty. Attachment to these men would have required the sisters to abandon each other and their community, while entangling themselves with two mercurial, egocentric social climbers during a period of dangerously extreme socio-political volatility in Europe.
Dinesen’s detailed portrayals of the two men underscore their unsuitability. Loewenhielm, Martine’s suitor, is described as ‘pleased with himself’ (Dinesen, 2013: 28); he is a spoilt, debt-ridden gambler obsessed with social advancement–an ‘ambitious’ man craving entry into ‘high circles’ (Dinesen, 2013: 28). Among the Lutherans he despises what he sees reflected in himself, longing instead for worldly brilliance: He loathed and despised the figure he himself cut . . . [he grew] smaller and more insignificant and contemptible. . . . He did not want to be a dreamer; he wanted to be like his brother-officers . . . he would cut a brilliant figure in a brilliant world. (Dinesen, 2013: 26–28)
Despite their generous hospitality, he mocks the community as ‘long-faced sectarians, in bare-floored rooms’ (Dinesen, 2013: 27) and in the film he calls them ‘pious melancholics who can’t even afford salt for their porridge’. Thirty years later, returning as a decorated general, after an illustrious military career and ‘prosperous existence’ in which he ‘had obtained everything he had striven for in life and was admired and envied by everyone’ (Dinesen, 2013: 51), he remains vain and worldly. He ‘strutted and shone like an ornamental bird’ (Dinesen, 2013: 50) in his decorated uniform among the simple, black-clad humble Lutherans. He is determined to ‘dominate the conversation round that same table by which young Lorens Loewenhielm had sat mute’ (Dinesen, 2013: 54, 61) and to lord his worldly success over the simple group of elderly Lutherans among whom he once felt so spiritually bankrupt and inferior.
Papin, Philippa’s suitor, is described as even more ‘distinguished’ (Dinesen, 2013: 28) than Loewenhielm. Alone in his own company, without admirers and applause, he immediately ‘fell into that melancholy in which he saw himself as an old man, at the end of his career’ (Dinesen, 2013: 29). When he hears Philippa sing in the pious congregation’s church, ‘he had a vision’ that Philippa ‘will lay Paris at her feet’ and, more importantly, that alongside her ‘[his] greatest triumphs are before [him]! The world will once more believe in miracles when she and [he] sing together!’ (Dinesen, 2013: 29, 30). Although described as ‘kind-hearted’ (Dinesen, 2013: 29), his seeming generosity in giving Philippa singing lessons clearly has an ulterior motive. He indeed deceives both Philippa and her father about this, ‘not mention[ing] the Opera of Paris, but describing at length how beautifully Miss Philippa would come to sing in church, to the glory of God’ (Dinesen, 2013: 30). When he tries to seduce Philippa with his singing (acting out the role of notorious womaniser and philanderer Don Juan in Mozart’s Don Giovanni) and he tells her of his Parisian dreams for her (‘[royalty] would listen to her and shed tears. The common people too would worship her.’.. (Dinesen, 2013: 30)), she summarily rejects him. He reacts with wounded egotism, calling Philippa ‘a hussy’ (Dinesen, 2013: 32). Dinesen therefore clearly describes both men as rather undesirable characters, and certainly not as men who would have been the equals of the two sisters in anything but their superior worldly social standing, nor would they likely have valued the two women for what they had to offer or for their inner beauty and goodness, as Babette does.
Dinesen explicitly contradicts interpretations of the sisters as inwardly anguished or regretful, though critics, especially of the film, often cast them in this way. The sisters only ‘sometimes’ remember the men (Dinesen, 2013:28), and when hearing of Loewenhielm’s presence at the feast they speak ‘easily and companionably . . . of old happy days’ (Dinesen, 2013:48). Dinesen (2013: 28) describes Philippa’s tender engagement with her sister about Martine’s strange encounter with Loewenhielm as follows: In the yellow house of Berlevaag, Philippa sometimes turned the talk to the handsome, silent young man who had so suddenly made his appearance, and so suddenly disappeared again. Her elder sister would then answer her gently, with a still, clear face, and find other things to discuss. (Dinesen, 2013: 28)
Given that Loewenhielm never declared his love for Martine, but left her with the strange parting words, ‘I shall never, never see you again! For I have learned here that Fate is hard, and that in this world there are things which are impossible’ (Dinesen, 2013: 27), one must consider that this was rather more a moment of great confusion for Martine, than necessarily a moment of great loss. Dinesen’s reference to her ‘still, clear face’ could suggest that she had reached resolution about this experience, which at best was a curiosity and at worst a moment of slight embarrassment. Dominant readings of this passage as sexual longing or regret, which is arguably visually suggested in Axel’s film, is not necessarily supported by Dinesen’s text. Likewise, Dinesen’s text says merely the following about Philippa’s response to Papin: Philippa went home, told her father that she did not want any more singing lessons and asked him to write and tell Monsieur Papin so. . . . In the Dean’s house Martine felt the matter was deeper than it looked, and searched her sister’s face. For a moment, slightly trembling, she too imagined that the Roman Catholic gentleman might have tried to kiss Philippa. She did not imagine that her sister might have been surprised and frightened by something in her own nature. . . . Of this visitor from the great world the sisters spoke but little; they lacked the words with which to discuss him. (Dinesen, 2013: 32)
Critics often interpret the ‘something in her own nature’ as sexual fear, but it may equally, or more plausibly, be fear of desire for fame and power–the very temptations Papin offers when he promises that she will be ‘worshipped’ (Dinesen, 2013: 30). This aligns with the biblical temptation of Jesus by the devil with promises of worldly power and riches, a significant parallel for a woman ‘brought up to an ideal of heavenly love’ and resistant to ‘the flames of this world’ (Dinesen, 2013: 25). Crucially, the most important words in this description of Philippa’s reaction to Papin’s attempt at seduction is the fact she ‘went home, told her father’ that she did no longer want singing lessons. These are the agentic and decisive actions of a strong will and of a woman who is aware of her rights and power, and of the possible dangers of what Papin offers. A timid woman in oppressed and repressed conditions would not dream to tell her father anything, nor to instruct him in how to negotiate her hand in marriage with a suitor, or to reject such a suitor, especially one of such prominence as Papin.
Reading the Sisters Within the Context of Their Time and Place
It is largely on these two very brief sections from Dinesen’s text, about the two sisters’ reactions to their suitors, that conventional interpretations of the sisters as broken or incomplete women, unfulfilled and pining for sexual love, or as lacking in some way, are based, superimposing sexual dynamics, and extrapolating from this the reasoning for all the mature decisions of a lifetime for both sisters. To do justice to the larger context of Dinesen’s story, I argue, not that the conventional readings of the sisters are necessarily wrong or invalid, but that the scales should be balanced to also allow for alternative readings that do not necessarily overemphasise the physical, sexual, and heteronormative as only or major imperative to the experience of womanhood or personhood.
Having seemingly chosen against sexual or romantic love, the sisters have, in fact, possibly chosen in favour of the intimacy and empathic bond of their shared sisterhood, what Schweitzer (2016: 340) describes as ‘classical’ philia, emphasising ‘voluntary, non-subordinating affiliation . . . parity, symmetry, spirituality and self-affirmation’, which was, until very recently, considered the ‘highest ideal of ethical, political, and social development in the human sphere’. Considering what they have gained in their sisterhood with one another, and with their extended community, also through later generously extending their circle of sisterly love to Babette, their decision (for Philippa) or fate (for Martine) seem to gain a much larger perspective. This strongly resonates with the idea of life work as artwork, which Babette so strongly speaks of at the end of the story when she says that the greatest desire of the artist is to do their utmost. The consequent realisation is that the way in which the sisters constructed their lives, the conscious choices and seeming sacrifices they made, constitutes a work of art in itself. Thus, art is life and life is art, as it also is for the culinary master-become-servant Babette, if both life and art are dedicated to service to a higher ideal, the highest of which, as this story suggests, is friendship. So, when the film ends with a sisterly embrace in which Philippa ensures Babette that her sacrifice and dedication will be rewarded, this is simultaneously a reciprocal confirmation of the value of the sisters’ lives, dedicated to sisterhood-philia and friendship-love and of how this constitutes the highest reward.
Although Babette’s story, and therefore the sisters’ too, is clearly allegorical and symbolic, the temptation should be resisted to reductively read the two sisters as merely ideological placeholders for all women, especially those in religious communities, thereby signifying them necessarily as victims of patriarchal or phallogocentric oppression. Maire Mullins (1994: 221) reductively reads Philippa’s choice to reject Papin as simplicity when she says, ‘she simply lacks the capacity to resist the ways of thinking into which she has been indoctrinated’. Gossman (1963: 319) likewise calls her ‘naïve’. I suggest an alternative reading, namely that Philippa, in fact, abundantly has the capacity to carefully consider her situation and prospects, her decisions and their consequences, possibly exactly because of the way that she was raised, not despite it. Her father was, after all revolutionary himself in breaking away from the mainstream religious institutions of his time to start a new community based on values and a belief system of reverence, practical pacifism, equality, compassion, and austerity. He would not have done this on a whim, but it would have been based on a lifetime dedicated to careful study and deep consideration, followed by a decision based on conviction, self-insight and inner fortitude.
Both the short story and film note that the sisters’ father was highly respected and that his theological works and sermons were widely read by many people of all walks of life across the entire country, including the queen and royal court (Dinesen, 2013: 56). The two sisters are therefore educated women (they speak at least two languages, Danish and French, since they converse with Papin and read his letter in the latter) and of high standing, not only in their own community, but in the wider world, due to their father’s prestige and influence. They would likely have been taught by their father to be careful and considered in their decisions, which is, in fact, exactly how they are presented in both texts, though critics seemingly fail to appreciate this.
So, Philippa’s rejection of Papin and the seemingly rich, glamorous, and adventurous life he offers her as an operatic diva needs more careful consideration. The suitor Papin is presented to the reader/viewer as a very convincing and adamant advocate for an alternative lifestyle, even winning over Philippa’s father, partly through deception. Dinesen (2013: 30) says, ‘nobody could long withstand Achille Papin when he had really set his heart on a matter’. To reject his advances and the ‘temptations’ of the life he offers possibly speaks of Philippa’s intelligence, strength of will and personal agency, not of weak-mindedness and naïveté. If she were weak minded and naïve she would most likely have fallen for him like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Yet she is rather, I argue, presented as a discerning, self-aware and mature young woman, who carefully and rationally considers the dynamics and potential of the situation and makes her decisions based on reason rather than emotion.
Philippa is rewarded for her youthful choices with deep existential and hermeneutic self-insight and acceptance. This happens at the end of the story when she can relate her own life story and choices to those of Babette, thereby entering into the true empathetic embrace of sisterhood and of humanity: compassionate community, interbeing and sharing through experiencing the self in the other and vice versa, even though the other is so different from the self (‘they felt her losses as their own, and their eyes filled with tears’ (Dinesen 2013: 65)). This is at the core of the radical theology of the small, pious Lutheran sect, symbolised through Babette’s ‘unforgettable proof of human loyalty and self-sacrifice’ (Dinesen 2013: 66) in eventually giving her utmost – her full story, her highest art, her fortune and her loving service – to serve a feast to the sisters who sheltered her and to her adopted community, despite the fact that they will never understand the extent of the sacrifice. Philippa’s awareness of this is a type of self-emptying insight, a kenosis of sorts, which is withheld from the other characters of the story, most notably the two worldly suitors. This supports my argument for the sisters as the real redemptive figures of the story, instead of Babette, as is more commonly assumed. This specifically stands in relation to the significance of friendship in Jesus’ teachings and the embodiment of this in his relationship of equality and philia with and among his band of followers. As Gail O’Day notes (2008: 20, 24), John 15:12-15 is the key passage . . . for a theology of friendship. . . . Jesus is both the model and the source of friendship. . . . Jesus has been the ultimate friend–he gave his life in love for us. Now it is our turn to be Jesus’ friend, which means that we love one another as he has loved us. . . . If we take Jesus’ commandment to love seriously, and if we long to be called ‘friend’ by Jesus, then the Christian vocation is to give love freely and generously without counting the cost and without wondering and worrying about who is on the receiving end of our limitless love.
Babette and Philippa can, at the end of the story, in their sisterly embrace, be read as mirror images or alter egos of one another, representing the life each would possibly have lived if they had chosen differently. This again folds back to my earlier quote from Derrida about thinking the self through the other, implying that I can see myself only because I can see what I am not, but possibly could have been, as reflected in the other. This supports the Aristotelean idea, as Schweitzer (2016: 342) notes, of dyadic friendship, that ‘a friend is another self or a second self (philos allos autos)’, with the friend acting as a mediating mirror of self-awareness: ‘whenever we wish to know our own characters and personalities, we can recognise them by looking upon a friend’ (Schweitzer, quoting Aristotle, 2016: 344).
When, at the end of the story, Babette renounces Paris and embraces a life with the austere sisters, one realises that she will forever after be the token (if only symbolic) of worldly pleasures in the sisterly dynamic, thereby mitigating the sisters’ youthful and later life choices. As the sisters gave Babette what she most needed–physical safety, security and true active community (as opposed to the failed ideal of the Paris Commune)–she can in return give to them the gift, not only of her culinary art as such, but of sharing her Parisian worldly experiences, which may give the sisters some vicarious pleasure and reward them with some sense of the joys of the life they did not choose, without the personal tragedy thereof, which Babette, in turn, must continue to carry as her own burden. This is supported by the words, bastardised by Loewenhielm in his drunken speech at the feast, which is the ‘well-known and cherished’ credo of the pious community: ‘That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly’ (Dinesen, 2013: 60). In orientating Babette to their lifestyle after inviting her to stay with them, the sisters tell her that ‘their own food must be as plain as possible; it was the soup-pails and baskets for their poor that signified’ (Dinesen, 2013: 36). For this self-denying charity they are rewarded years later with Babette’s luxurious feast from the Café Anglais. Another part of their spiritual credo is significantly, ‘The only things which we may take with us from our life on earth are those which we have given away!’ (Dinesen, 2013: 59). One is reminded of the fact that what Loewenhielm and Papin have in common is the Café Anglais and that, had the sisters left their community with these two men, they would likely both have encountered Babette there. Yet because of their decisions and the way fate intervened in their lives, the three women still found one another, yet in a way much deeper and richer than would have been the case if they met in Paris at the Café Anglias – instead of them going to the Café Anglais, the Café Anglais was sent to them.
Narrative Gaps in the Back Story of the Sisters
Like the film’s excision of Babette’s Communard back story, the short story and film differ in small but very significant ways in the way certain aspects of the sisters’ backstory are presented. This is worth some exploration, since it provides much insight into the sisters’ choices and prompts an alternative reading of the dynamic between the three women.
In the film, the community where the sisters live is visually depicted as desolate and remote, with only a few austere whitewashed houses against a mostly Danish landscape drained of colour. Only in the scenes where Babette gathers herbs and walks along the beach is she pictured against the colourful palette of a sunset, springtime, and the Nordic coastline, symbolising the life and colour she brings to the sisters’ life. In Dinesen’s original short story, though, the bustling Norwegian fishing and sea-faring harbour town of Berlevaag, where the story is set and where the sisters live, is vibrantly colourful; not a remote isolated village at all, and the sisters are actively involved in the hustle-and-bustle of the town. Dinesen (2013: 22) introduces the sisters by saying, At the foot of the mountains the small town of Berlevaag looks like a child’s toy-town of little wooden pieces painted grey, yellow, pink and many other colours. Sixty-five years ago, two elderly ladies lived in one of the yellow houses . . ..
Although Dinesen (2013: 23) describes their community as a ‘pious ecclesiastical party or sect’, this term did not carry the same negative connotations when the short story was written, or when the narrative is set, as it does today, with our more contemporary associations with anti-social, sinister, indoctrinating cults. Dinesen (2013: 23) notes that the sister’s sect ‘was known and looked up to in all the country of Norway’. So, not only are the two Lutheran sisters of Berlevaag active members of their colourful local town community, their beliefs and religious convictions are well-known and highly respected throughout their country and even beyond.
It is also important to note the difference in the film and original short story’s engagement with time. In Dinesen’s original version the story is told from the time when it was written and published (1950), when the sisters were likely already deceased, since it situates the narrative ‘sixty-five years ago’ (so around 1885, counting back from about 1950) when ‘two elderly ladies lived in one of the yellow houses’ (Dinesen, 2013: 24). In fact, the two sisters would (in 1885) only have been around 50 years old, using other time markers in the story to calculate their age.
The story then takes the reader back to a time (clearly noted as ‘1854’ and ‘a year later’ (so 1855) (Dinesen, 2013: 25, 28)) when the sisters (only a year apart in age) were 18 years old, and briefly recounts the stories of their encounters with Loewenhielm and Papin. The story then skips ahead 15 years (Dinesen, 2013: 23) to the stormy night in 1871 (again, clearly noted as such) when Babette arrives on the sisters’ doorstep – ‘a massive, dark, deadly pale woman . . . haggard and wild-eyed like a hunted animal’ (Dinesen, 2013: 32, 35). This means that the sisters would only have been 34 (Martine) and 33 (Philippa), respectively, when Babette entered their lives, still very much of marriageable and even child-bearing age, even in those days, if they so desired. We also know from Dinesen’s descriptions that they had many suitors in the bustling town in which they lived, both from outside the sect (those who went to church just to see the sisters) and from within their own spiritual community. She says that ‘more than one of the elderly brothers had been prizing the maidens far above rubies and had suggested as much to their father’ (Dinesen, 2013: 25).
Babette, however, in turn, at this time is described as ‘elderly’ (Dinesen, 2013: 35), making her possibly at least as old as the sisters’ mother would have been at the time, had she lived, possibly even older. The sisters’ mother is never mentioned in the story, except to say that the sisters placed candlesticks on her worktable for the feast (Dinesen, 2013: 49), but one assumes she died young, since their father is described as an aging widower (he ‘married late in life’ (Dinesen, 2013: 24)), even at the time when his daughters were 18 years old. Using Dinesen’s earlier description of the sisters at 50 as ‘elderly’, one can assume that Babette would likely have been at least in her mid-fifties when she arrived at the sister’s home in 1871, thus likely close to two decades older than the sisters.
This is, however, very different in the film, in which the sisters are depicted as women in at least their sixties (portrayed by the Danish actresses Birgitte Federspiel (62 at the time of filming) and Bodil Kjer (70 at the time of filming)) when Babette arrives at their door for the first time in 1871, with Babette (portrayed by Stéphane Audran, 55 at the time of filming) depicted as being in probably her late 30s or early 40s. This reversal of the ages of the main characters is significant and has serious implications for the way Axel rewrites the narrative, but it is not ever mentioned by critics and commentators. Dinesen’s original story says that Babette ‘remained in the house of the Dean’s daughters for 12 years, until the time of this tale’ (Dinesen, 2013: 35), ‘this tale’ being the story of the events of the miraculous feast. This would make the sisters around 45 and 46 years old at the time of the feast – certainly not the old women of the film. But Babette, in turn, would indeed have been old, if she was already elderly 12 years earlier when she arrived at their door. If Babette was, let’s say, 55 when she arrived at the sisters’ home, that would make her close to 70 at the time of the feast 12 or 14 years later.
This age reversal completely erases the subtextual implications of a substitute and sublimating maternal relationship between Babette and the sisters, where Babette stands in for the mother the sisters never knew or lost early and the sisters stand in for the child that Babette lost, who was executed during the Paris Communard revolt alongside her husband. It eliminates insight about the generosity of the sisters’ act in sheltering an aging working woman (much like the rest of their community) who had spent her life toiling in kitchens doing hard physical labour and would have had nowhere else to go and no way to support herself if it were not for the sisters. This gives a rather different and more literal slant to Babette’s words when she first comes to the sisters, and they tell her that they cannot afford an experienced housekeeper of her calibre. She says (Dinesen, 2013: 35) to them, ‘she would serve Monsieur Papin’s good people for nothing, and that she would take service with nobody else. If they sent her away, she must die’. This would have been unimaginable and intolerable to the sisters, who ‘spent their time and their small income in works of charity; no sorrowful or distressed creature knocked on their door in vain’ (Dinesen, 2013: 24).
Another significant age-related narrative gap between the short story and film is the one around the motivation behind Philippa’s decision to reject Papin’s advances and his offer to make her into a prima donna of the Paris Opera. As I already noted, her choice is clearly her own. Philippa’s choice is most likely more a choice in favour of her sister and their close bond of love than for her father or due to his controlling, oppressive patriarchal and religiously constricting and indoctrinating influence (which many commentators assume, though there is no evidence in either text for this). Leaving her father to pursue an operatic career would have still left him with one daughter to care for him and the community. If patriarchy and heteronormativity were the overriding power matrix here, the losing of a father and the gaining of a lover/husband would have seemed to be the natural, even mature, exchange and progression. Instead, Dinesen undermines this by having Philippa choose to remain with her sister and to follow a career path that would lead her to become the leader of her community. Moreover, if Philippa truly wished for the love, power, and fame that Papin offered, she could have accepted his offer without real consequence. It is clear from both texts that her father neither forced her decision nor would have rejected or refused her if she chose to go with Papin; instead, he is painted as a wise, kind, and gentle man who allows his daughters freedom to follow their own consciences. Rather he says to her God’s paths run across the sea and the snowy mountains, where man’s eye sees no track . . . And God’s paths run across the rivers, my child. (Dinesen, 2013: 30, 31)
In fact, the father of the story is never depicted as pedantic or prescriptive towards his community and especially not towards his daughters. Rather Dinesen (2013: 24) says that in his little yellow house the community (and by implication his daughters) ‘were at home and at peace’.
What is, however, omitted from the film is the fact that Papin (‘a handsome man of forty’ (Dinesen, 2013: 29)) was twenty-two years older than the eighteen-year-old Philippa. Though marriages between older men and younger women were more commonplace at the time of the story, often forced on women as marriages of convenience based on interfamilial bonds and a matrimonial economy of exchange (that, in fact, would have given a patriarchal and oppressive slant to the story, but is not how Dinesen depicts it), one could very well understand young Philippa’s reluctance to accept, or even her aversion to, Papin’s advances, for he was a much older man, more than twice her own age. The conventional interpretation by critics that Philippa’s reaction to Papin’s attempt at seduction is one prompted by her fear of her own sexuality must therefore be reconsidered and the possibility of another motivation must at least be acknowledged, namely that she may not have wanted to be exposed to the potentially exploitative advances of a lecherous much older man.
Philippa significantly chooses to stay for the greater good of the community where her life of meaningful service would become her artwork, even more than, or at least equal to, what she would have gained as a prima donna in Paris. When Papin tries to convince her to join him in Paris, he tells her, ‘she would bring consolation and strength to the oppressed’ (Dinesen, 2013: 30) with her voice. The film shows how she silently and inwardly considers this, and one can imagine her thinking something like ‘I don’t have to go to Paris to do that’. The irony that she would have been performing for the rich elite rather than the oppressed would likely not have escaped her notice. This is echoed in Babette’s complex moral dilemma of serving haute cuisine to the rich patrons of the Café Anglais who oppress the starving multitudes of Paris. One must therefore at least consider the possibility that Philippa is, in fact, a contemplative, independent and mature young woman who was neither impressed nor attracted to aging Achille Papin’s cloying neediness or tendencies to control, nor tempted by the Paris high life he represented. Dinesen indeed makes it very clear that it is exactly this duplicitous complexity of the Parisian high-life that world-weary Papin retreats from when he escapes on brief holiday to the serenity of the Scandinavian countryside, where he encounters the young angelic Philippa. Retrospectively, in his letter to the sisters fifteen years later, still the melodramatic player, he says to Philippa, ‘I feel that you have chosen the better part in life. What is fame? What is glory? The grave awaits us all’ (Dinesen, 2013: 34).
There are also some discrepancies in the depiction of the father of the film and the short story. Much has been assumed by critics about the sisters’ father. The sisters cannot truly be understood if consideration is not given to their father. Although he is the leader of a pious community, he is clearly a man of the world, though not in the world, to borrow a biblical phrase. As noted above, he would have been a highly educated man, who would likely have studied at leading universities and moved among great scholars, which he is also considered to be. Moreover, he would have lived through the tumult the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars wrought on Europe. His founding of an egalitarian community (called ‘The Brotherhood’ (Dinesen, 2013: 23)) is therefore very contemporary in relation to his time. His pious Lutheran community of fishermen (like Jesus’s band of friends) narratively stands as a strong counterpoint to the failed ideal of the Communards.
It is then largely through their father’s austere example and material legacy that the two sisters can live independently into old age, living modestly in the little yellow house they inherited from him, and supported by a small pension from his estate. This legacy grants them the freedom to live by their own consciences, under no man’s authority, and to function as highly respected leaders -effectively secular priests–within their community. In this sense, they are closer to Parisian Babette, an independent career woman, than is often acknowledged. Symbolically, the sisters together inherit their father’s place and prestige, presiding together at the head of the table when the community gathers. One of the story’s most radical yet subtle contributions therefore is its argument for women as leaders within the church, whether ordained or not. Their father’s claim that his daughters were ‘his right and left hand’ (Dinesen 2013: 25), often interpreted as evidence of his damaging control over their sexuality and freedom, can instead be read as his granting them both protection and freedom, and as bestowing upon them the authority to lead in a space traditionally reserved for men.
Conclusion
When Babette reveals her identity to the sisters, declaring ‘I am a great artist’, she tells them that ‘a great artist, Mesdames, is never poor . . . We have something . . . of which other people know nothing’ (Dinesen, 2013: 67). The ‘we’ refers to artists and to spiritual rather than material wealth, but it can also be read as naming the sisterhood Babette now fully inhabits after the feast. She thus acknowledges her equality and kinship with the sisters, grounded in their shared devotion to service, discipline, and vocation. Despite their differences, this devotion is embodied in the highest art: philia–friendship-love and sisterhood.
As Curry (2012: 9) observes, the film’s opening scene is chronologically its conclusion, occurring after the feast. In this peaceful scene Babette serves refreshments while the sisters sit together at the head of the communal table, leading the service and tending their flock. The quiet companionship of the women is evident in their exchanged looks of care and kindness, confirming Papin’s intuition in sending Babette from Paris to the Puritan sisters in Scandinavia: they are of the same mettle. Papin thus functions as a narrative deus ex machina, enabling the conditions for a radical sisterhood that exemplifies what Schweitzer calls (2016: 364) ‘a dynamic, improvisational, sometimes improbable process that operates outside of the terms of self/other and sameness/difference and requires that we practice a form of self-exile and self-pluralization [by] . . . travelling to the other’s world . . . risking inviting the stranger within’.
