35 pages • 1 hour read
Karen BlixenBabette's Feast
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Karen Blixen and Spirituality
Karen Blixen (1885-1962) was born in Denmark. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, was also a writer and fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He witnessed and wrote about the Paris Commune, which was a short-lived government led by the French National Guard that controlled Paris for around three months in 1871. Blixen was close to her father, but he died by suicide when she was only nine years old.
Wilhelm Dinesen’s family was wealthy, conservative, and connected to Danish nobility. Blixen’s mother, Ingeborg Westenholz, came from a wealthy bourgeois family in which the women were Unitarian. This meant they believed individuals should take personal responsibility for their relationship with God instead of relying on salvation through Jesus Christ. They also embraced creativity and diversity. Blixen’s views on religion and other important matters, such as women’s rights, were honed during her education by the Westenholz family.
Blixen herself did not share the ascetism of her main characters in “Babette’s Feast.” On her first trip to the United States, for example, she ate oysters every day. She was also a heavy smoker and said, “They don’t like me too much in Denmark—perhaps I’m too fantastic” (“A Tale-weaving Sorceress.” LIFE, 19 Jan 1959, p. 47). She led an adventurous life, moving to Kenya (then British East Africa) with her husband, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, to run a coffee farm in 1914. She lived there until 1931, and the experience became the basis for her famous memoir Out of Africa (1937). Blixen wrote in Danish and English and used different pseudonyms depending on the language. Her best-known pseudonyms are Isak Dinesen, which she used in English-speaking countries, and Tania Blixen, which she used in German-speaking countries.
“Babette’s Feast” depicts a type of spirituality that embraces earthly things like food and drink, and the people who experience the pleasure and artistry of Babette’s dinner actually come closer to God. This is a great contrast to when they were living piously and rejecting frivolous or overtly pleasurable things. At that time, they were quarreling and miserable. Considering Blixen’s Unitarian upbringing, the moral of “Babette’s Feast” is rooted in the notion that passionate artistry is closer to godliness than ascetism in the name of religious piety, and that physical pleasure has a role in spiritual satisfaction.
Socio-Historical Context: Les Pétroleuses and the Paris Commune
Babette’s past in Paris highlights both the depth of her passion and the cultural divide between her and the humble people of Berlevaag. In Papin’s letter, he writes that Babette “was arrested as a Pétroleuse” (13), and later, Babette refers to herself as a Communard, which is the name for the people who participated in the Paris Commune uprising of 1871.
The Paris Commune was a government spearheaded by the National Guard and backed by the working class. One group that came to represent the chaos and destruction of the Paris Commune was the pétroleuses. These were female Communards who were accused of using petroleum to set fire to much of Paris in the last days of the revolution. Women also played a large role in other parts of the revolution, including in the building of barricades and the loading of weapons for soldiers.
In the aftermath of the Paris Commune, called the Bloody Week, thousands of Communards were executed when the Third Republic of France’s National Army regained control of the city. Large-scale acts of arson were major traits of the Bloody Week, as Communards burned down government and cultural symbols, such as the Palais d’Orsay and the Tuileries Palace, private homes, and it is no wonder that Babette’s husband and son—who, as “ladies’ hairdressers” (13), were members of the working class—were killed. The term pétroleuses—sometimes translated as “women incendiaries”—conjures images of strength and courage; the sisters feel this keenly when, after observing Babette lost in “memories and longings of which they knew nothing,” they think to themselves, “Perhaps after all she had indeed been a Pétroleuse” (17). This observation highlights Babette’s unknowability to the sisters, who fear everything that is culturally different from them; Babette’s Catholicism, French cooking, and foreign language fill the sisters with dread. Though none of these fears keep them from treating Babette kindly, the sisters still perceive her as “other,” and the possibility of her having been a female arsonist is even more terrifying.
The infamy of the pétroleuses spread to even the sheltered community of Berlevaag. This explains Philippa’s surprise that Babette longs for her former rich patrons at the Café Anglais, considering on which side of the Paris Commune Babette fought. But it also brings the reader’s attention to the naivete of the sisters, who can only conceive of Babette as a dangerous, mythic pétroleuse, and conflate her radical politics with her desire to give them a joyful, luxuriant feast, which they consider equally dangerous. They don’t see her as the great artist she is until she herself points it out and explains it in terms that Philippa in particular can understand.
