Disrupting Eating Spaces in Isak Dinesen’s 'Babette’s Feast'

Abstract

Up until recently, the bilingual tales of Danish author Isak Dinesen have been critically appreciated and discussed mostly in relation to their narrative complexity and dramatic theatricality. Focusing on her well-known story “Babette’s Feast”, this essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s understanding of supplementarity, on feminist insights into embodiment and recent new materialist theories to address, instead, the place of enfleshed materiality in her revisionist articulations of gender and community. It calls attention to how food, as live matter, impacts through the organic process of eating, the subject’s movement in and perception of physical, social and gender spaces, contributing thus to recent scholarly engagement with the significance of corporeality and material agency for her fictions’ sexual and cultural politics. Implicit in her re-assertion of the material, as it is argued, is Dinesen’s sharp critique of the Protestant valorisation of spirit over matter and the masculinist assumptions built into this spatial configuration.

Keywords

• food
• eating
• protestant spirituality
• new materialism
• space