Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the parentless orphans of romance, in figures like David Copperfield, Harry
Potter, Dorothy Gale, and Frodo Baggins, who carry out some redacted ver-
sion of the Bible's sacred quest. Because these parallel elements are likewise
ordered into a parallel
mythos
, the thematic features of myth persist in these
secular spin-offs.
An illustration of this may be found in Isak Dinesen's brief comic
romance, “Babette's Feast.”
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Two of the story's main characters, Philippa
and Martine, are the devoted daughters of a stoic and somewhat controlling
Lutheran minister who presides over a small flock of believers who occupy a
remote fishing village that lies along the grey and frigid coastline of Norway.
At the time in which the main part of the story unfolds, their father has
been dead many years, and the two elderly daughters carry on their father's
work by attending to the remnant of his declining congregation. In their
youth, their beauty and talent had drawn the attention of suitors of con-
siderable worldly promise. A young officer exiled by his father to this rural
village as punishment for his dissolute excesses finds himself roused from
his despondency by the supernatural beauty of Martine. Philippa receives
vocal training under the disapproving eye of her Puritanical father from
Achille Papin, the director of the Paris opera. Papin's discovery of Philippa's
talent revives him from the depression of a mid-life crisis, causing him to
become entirely consumed with the hope of transforming her into a great
diva. But the sisters refuse these suitors. Bowing to their father's opinion
that “earthly love and marriage are of scant worth and merely empty illu-
sion,” they remain with him in obscurity and poverty.
Many years later, and long after the death of their father, Papin solicits
the sisters' help as he tries to find a home for Babette Hersant, a Parisian
refugee whose husband and son have become the victims of brutal political
reprisals against the Paris Commune. An important element of irony enters
the story at this point. Although Philippa and Martine offer asylum to this
woman, they have no idea of her true stature. Once the greatest chef in all
of France, Babette now spends her years in exile cooking for the elderly
residents of this faraway fishing community. In addition to the austerity of
their living conditions, relationships among the villagers have been strained
by years of bickering and accumulated resentments. But Babette seems to
revitalize them in both body and soul. The servant seems almost the master.
In the hands of this artist, the villagers' bland diet of cod and ale-and-bread
soup becomes palatable, and her service frees the two sisters to again per-
form various charitable works.
