The Raw and the Cooked, Or Why Politics Matters in ‘Babette’s Feast’

Despite its popularity as a “food film” and icon of the Slow Food movement, one must admit that Babette’s Feast (directed by Axel Gabriel, 1986) disappoints. In its saccharine treatment of the relations between Babette and her employers, Gabriel’s film fails to honor the spirit of Isak Dinesen’s original, published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1950 and subsequently reprinted in Dinesen’s final collection, Anecdotes of Destiny (1958). Why does this matter? Because in softening the edges of Babette’s character, the film ignores her political force and transformative potential—a force all the more urgent for the 2010s, when women from Sana’a to Seattle have been mobilizing for political change with astonishing energy and hope. “Babette” deserves better.

I believe Babette’s story is more interesting as a parable of specifically French politics than as a “food film,” and that it is indebted to two icons of French womanhood whose identities are deeply invested in food, fire, and revolution. In Dinesen’s heroine we can hear distant echoes of both the poissarde–the fishmonger or market woman of the French Revolution—and the pétroleuse or fire-starter of the Commune. “Babette’s Feast” allows the lineage from the poissarde to the pétroleuse to come into focus because its heroine is not only a cook she is also a former pétroleuse. And even if the politics of her past were muted by the film-maker in 1986, the relationship between food, fire and revolution is too potent a mix to ignore today.

The film’s shortcoming is unsurprising when one realizes how apolitical most interpretations of Isak Dinesen’s work and her heroine have been. In order to bring this lost subtext back into light, I am developing a short work that follows three moves: first, a quick glance at two moments in French political history will reveal the cultural work done by the poissarde and the pétroleuse in the revolutionary eras of 1789-94 and 1871. Second, textual analysis of culinary allusions and narrative asides in “Babette’s Feast” will demonstrate how Dinesen’s heroine incarnates both the pride of a culinary genius and the pétroleuse’s menace to society. Finally, a comparison of the story’s finale will show how the book’s heroine—unlike her avatar on the screen—transforms radicalism into a different kind of rigor, a more life-giving and artistic ambition than film-goers can see. In her portrayal of an appealing working–class woman who is both an unrepentant revolutionary and an authentic artist, Dinesen’s tale reveals a stronger affirmation of human potential than has yet been realized.

Any film-makers out there? Time for a remake, a truly revolutionary rendition of “Babette’s Feast.” Stay tuned for the fiery details…

How to translate a poissarde?

The poissarde or fish seller has a long and interesting history. The market women of Paris had a special relation to the king since the Middle Ages when Saint Louis granted destitute women the exclusive privilege to sell retail goods and especially fish at designated sites in city markets. Biblical teachings led the French to consider fish a particularly pure species and so, thanks to the 138 fast days dictated by Catholic dogma, fish sellers were a crucial supplier of ritualized sanctity: being a harangère was a lucrative job. Since the reign of Louis XV, market women travelled twice a year to meet with the king at Versailles and they also appeared on special occasions such as royal marriages or births. But the nature of their politics—or even the existence of a dominant political consciousness among these people—remains unclear. As Pierre Ronzeaud has noted, the figure of the foul-mouthed harangère or herring-monger was already a well-known topos in the Mazarinades of the 1650s; in these texts the women’s socio-economic realities were buried under a cartoonish vulgarity that proved remarkably impervious to change. A similar ventriloquism runs through revolutionary-age pamphletry. True, the market women’s absence from festivities on the eve of the Assumption in 1787, when they had been expected to present flowers and compliments to Queen Marie-Antoinette, provoked anxiety at court. A police injunction two days later forced them to comply. It is also true, as Carla Hesse reminds us, that a number of market women expressed their displeasure with King Louis XVI in early 1789 by participating in a performance of the Souper de Henri IV at a Parisian theater and drinking a toast to Henri IV. While such incidents suggest that the women’s traditional bond to the crown was under pressure, economic considerations, as well as the poissard literary tradition, point to a more complex situation.
This complexity comes to the fore when a poissard text is translated into English. What modern-day English dialect or idiom can render the occasionally vulgar rough-and-tumble words of Parisian fish sellers of the past? In Summer 2009, I hired Sonja Stojanovic to translate Le Falot du peuple (The People’s Lantern, ca. 1792-93)*. Her solution to the problem of dialect was to render the market women’s speech in a Cajun-inflected English, with the help of Robert Hendrickson’s Whistlin’ Dixie: A Dictionary of Southern Expressions (1993). I think that the results are great! Here is an excerpt to whet your appetite for Chapter One, “From Fish Seller to Suffragette” of my book-in-progress, A Revolution in Fiction…
The People’s Lantern, or dialogues of Miz Salmon, Fishwife, on the trial of Louis XVI, trans. Sonja Stojanovic
Miz Salmon: Hey, ol’ Ma, how you been? For eight days now, you’re in a sull and avoiding me; come on, let’s go grab a drink: for having not the same opinion, do we have to eat each other up?
Tender Ma: What do you want, Miz Salmon, you’re rich, you, you ain’t caring; ifn this sells or not, don’t matter to you. Anyways, regardin’ poor Louis XVI, I’m frettin’ & I don’t dare say nothin’ yet; but you, it is all from the contrary, it gives you such a tone in this market, you’ve become the loud and big one, & this on account of you screamin’ your lungs out against poor Louis XVI. But tell me, Miz Salmon, everwhat did he do to you to not abide him like that?
Miz Salmon: But my child, to me he ain’t done nothin’; but they lay it to him, the cause of this all, that he has made them prices raised, that he made bread ‘n fish go missin; in short, that the 10th of August he wanted to have us all killed, & that it is him who is stirrin’ up all the Prussians, & who has all our menses killed. You see I ain’t wrong when we have rage against him.
Tender Ma: Hey ol’ neighbor, you made my heart bloom in talking to me like that heart-to-heart but ifn you have a moment, I’ll soon, in reason, have brought you to your senses & you’ll see.
Primo uno & first off, my dear friend, he’s maybe the cause of the actual’s wrangle, & that’s without wantin’ it, & through a good motive …

* Le Falot du peuple, attributed to C. Bellanger, repr. in Dialogues révolutionnaires, ed. Malcolm Cook (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), 73-81.

Nourishing the revolutionary spirit

A paradox confronts the scholar of revolutionary literature.  One is initially drawn to this material because of its immense energy, optimism for democratic principles, and verifiable, powerful engagement in politics.  Also attractive are the voices of rarely heard members of society: the poissarde (fish-seller of les Halles) and the peasant, policemen and prostitutes.  And yet, over time, one realizes that most of the best texts published in 1789-1804, judged in terms of literary quality–style, characterization, imagery, plot–argue against the principles of 1789 and are in fact counter-revolutionary.  A new project seeks to gather some of these texts–from both sides of the political divide–to make them available for teaching in a bilingual edition with critical background and notes. 

So far, the texts under consideration include:  Le Falot du peuple (a lively dialogue on the king’s trial, as seen by two poissardes and a public writer), J’attends (a sensationally horrid little account of the guillotine waiting for the Queen), short stories by Condorcet, Sade, and possibly the whole text of Pauliska, which is arguably the best novel of the post-revolutionary period. 

Pauliska never fails to appeal with its bizarre plots of secret societies, vampirish scientific practices, and incredible gender bending.  But it also imparts a poignant sense of emigration, exile, and trauma.

Stay tuned for more on this project, launched by Julia Douthwaite and Catriona Seth, Université de Nancy, and feel free to send us your ideas too!