Th 215
The Religious Imagination: Theology and the Arts
Dr. David Schimpf
Introduction to Babette’s Feast

Babette's Feast was first published in the Ladies Home Journal, and later it appeared in Isak Dinesen's (pen name of Karen Blixen) Anecdotes of Destiny, published in 1958. The movie, directed by Gabriel Axel, received the Academy Award in 1987 for Best Foreign Film. She is best known for the novel Out of Africa, written in 1937-38, which become a successful film.

She wrote Babette’s Feast near the end of her life, while she was suffering from intense abdominal pain, never accurately diagnosed, which eventually contributed to her death from malnutrition in 1962.

There is a legend, that Blixen herself suggested, that she died of syphilis that she contracted from her husband in their first year of marrage. The symptoms she exhibited, however, tend to invalidate that diagnosis. She also took treatments of arsenic and mercury, the main treatments for syphilis in the first half of the twentieth century, but her symptoms were not those of mercury or arsenic poisoning.

Main characters and setting:

Martina’s and Philippa’s father is the minister of a Lutheran sect in a small seaside community in northern Jutland, a region in Denmark (there is discussion in the film about getting the boat from Frederikshavn, which is located in extreme north-northwestern Jutland; we can assume that the village in which the action takes place is farther north of Frederikshavn):

The location is desolate, isolated, and buffeted by winds and storms. The father had founded this community some years before; not all villagers belong to the community.

He had two daughters, Martina (eldest) and Phillipa. Both women, elderly during the main action of the film, had been in love during their youth, but were prevented by their own expectations of their fathers’ wishes from getting married. Martina’s “love” was a young army officer, later General Loewenhielm. He was sent by his father to spend some time with his elderly aunt in northern Jutland to get his life straightened out. While there, he fell in love with Martina, but came to realize that she was unavailable to him. As they part, he said to her that he had come to realize that the world was hard and cruel, and that there were some things that were impossible.

Later the young man married a lady-in-waiting in the Queen of Denmark’s court, and insinuated himself into the court, in part by quoting the minister, as piety was in vogue. He eventually became a prominent and powerful General.

Philippa had a beautiful voice, and was overheard by a visiting French opera singer, Achille Papin, who was visiting the area on vacation. Once he heard her, he was convinced that she could be a diva. He convinced her and her father to allow him to give her private vocal lessons. After a lesson in which it is clear that they were falling in love, Philippa asked her father to end the lessons. Papin returned to France, disappointed and embittered.

Some years later, a mysterious woman appeared on the doorstep of the now-elderly sisters home in the midst of a storm. She spoke no Danish, and bore a letter from Papin, who informed the sisters that this woman, Babette Hersant, was a refugee from a rebellion in France. Her husband and son had been killed, and she was seeking refuge. She became the housekeeper of sisters for no pay.

For more information on Karen Blixen, see http://www.karenblixen.com/ .