Abundance and Simplicity: Participation in Babette's Feast

At the end of Gabriel Axel's movie "Babette's Feast", the French maid and former chef is praised for her feast but also told she should not have given everything for that purpose - "for our sake". She replies, "It was not for your sake only." In Isak Dinesen/ Karen Blixen's short story of the same name, Babette replies, "It was not for your sake." "Only" sets the movie quite apart from the novella when interpreting who Babette is. The study compares the original short story as first published in The Ladies Home Journal, June 1950 with its later version in English and in Danish translations (1950 and 1958) as well as with Gabriel Axel's reading of it in his manuscript for the movie as well as with the resulting movie. The analysis take the formats and contexts of the publications into consideration.

ELH, 2000

Film and Faith, ed. Carson Holloway and Micah Watson (Lexington Books), 2023

A common charge against traditional theistic views is that they promote a problematic otherworldliness that denigrates our this-worldly existence and so fails to affirm it properly. The charge is familiar from Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. For instance, Nietzsche's Zarathustra remarks: "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary." In the background of Nietzsche's criticism here is a concern to address the problem of cosmodicy, which is the problem of justifying and affirming life in the world as good and worthwhile in the face of hardship. Thus, another way to put the charge against traditional theistic religions here is in terms of a failure to address the problem of cosmodicy. It is true that theists have sometimes adopted a problematic otherworldly posture that denigrates our this-worldly existence. However, such a posture is at odds with biblical theology, since in the first creation story in Genesis 1, God creates the world and declares it "very good." Indeed, if it is to address the problem of cosmodicy, then it seems that a theistic perspective must find its way to a similar affirmation of the world, a yes-saying that is based not merely on willpower (as it is for Nietzsche) but rather on an appreciative attention to the given good of the world. In other words, it requires a kind of receptivity to grace, where "grace" is understood phenomenologically as something that is experienced as coming to us from without, a given unmerited good to which we need to be properly responsive. In this essay we will make the case for the claim that a theistic posture of receptivity to grace in the world can enable us to address the problem of cosmodicy and become properly at home in the world. We will do so through reflecting on Gabriel Axel's 1987 film Babette's Feast, which is an adaptation of a short story of that title by Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen), first published in 1958. We will show how it offers a depiction of a Hegelian-esque dialectic where a problematic worldliness (thesis) meets a problematic otherworldliness (antithesis), which is resolved in a vision of life where a kind of receptivity to grace enables us to affirm life in the world and become properly at home within it (synthesis). We will take up each stage of this dialectic in turn.

In Writing from Below, vol. 2, no. 1 (December 2014)

The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes’s Poetry, 2019

On its surface, a typical Angie Estes poem is all fun and filigree. But underneath the play-the oxymorons, etymological rabbit holes, multilingual puns-is someone who thinks and feels deeply about her world, largely through European art, broadly defined: visual art, music, and architecture, but also fashion, food, typography. The opening poem of Chez Nous (2005), Estes's third book, introduces a speaker whose magnetic attraction to "glamour" can fire off thoughts like a railgun: to the Rita Hayworth film noir quoted in its first lines-"I can never get a zipper / to close. Maybe that stands / for something, what do you think?"-or to an equally seductive landscape:

2019

One of the fundamental stories in fairy tale studies is "Cinderella": folkloric designation ATU 510A, the Persecuted Heroine. As Fairy tale and Folklore studies continue to evolve, authors beyond Basile, Perrault and Grimm are added into the Cinderella canon to lend a more nuanced approach to the study of this fairy tale. Yet "Cinderella" is still often interpreted as a tale of feminine submissiveness, in which the heroine is little more than a passive ornament or else a likeable social-climber. These interpretations stem largely from the focus of "Cinderella" stories written by men. Though studies of "Cinderella" are expanding, "Cendrillon", "Aschenputtel", and Walt Disney's Cinderella remain the foundational tales that are thought of when "Cinderella" is mentioned. This research addresses the problem that female writers of "Cinderella" remain marginalized within analyses of the tale. This research considers five versions of "Cinderella" from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, from women authors, mediated in five different formats: literary fairy tale, novel, short story, and poetry. Mme D'Aulnoy's "Finette Cendron" and Mlle L'Héritier's "L'Adroite Princesse ou les Aventures de Finette," protofeminist literary fairy tales from seventeenth-century France, present Cinderellas who hail from the birth of the modern fairy tale but show personalities that most do not associate with the princess. D'Aulnoy and L'Héritier's Finettes are dutiful to their family and kingdom, but aggressively pursue their ambitions and secure for themselves both high-status as well as fulfilling futures. Jane Austen's eighteenth-century novel Persuasion brings a sharp contrast to traditional views of the fairy helper. Louisa May Alcott's "A Modern Cinderella: or, The Little Old Shoe" is Dedication To my family, whom I love dearly. v Acknowledgements This project would never have been possible without Dr. Charlotte Trinquet du Lys. Without Dr. Trinquet du Lys I would have never discovered the depth of my passion for fairy tales. There was never a moment when she would not lend me an ear, or a book, or both. She has helped me grow so much and I could not have asked for a more helpful and understanding chair. I know I can always count on your invaluable guidance.

Sixteenth Century Journal, 2006

Recently I was delighted to discover online Michael David Felker's critical edition of Isabella Whitney's poetry, submitted as a doctoral thesis at Texas Tech University in 1990. This work had been a tantalising reference in the critical studies I had read for my MPhil dissertation in 2008; it is now available for free full-text download at the University's EDT database in gorgeous PDF. 1 While increase in free online access to EDTs does not exactly indicate the growing popularity of Renaissance women studies; I was heartened to know that future students of early female authors like me would be spared the expense of facsimile editions thanks to this online resource. Academic interest in the field of Renaissance women writers has evolved from a whimsical glint in one woman writer's eye daydreaming about Shakespeare's sister in 1929 until it has acquired its present status as a strongly established field of scholarship. Although the formation of the canons of such writers in the face of weak historical presences is still an ongoing process, this area of studies has 'rediscovered' literally hundreds of prolific women writing in England alone in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has engaged with their texts not only as cultural artefacts testifying about contemporary socio-sexual politics but also as complex literary texts that yield a deeper understanding about individual subjectivity and authorial agency as experienced and expressed by competent, even brilliant, artists in an environment essentially hostile to their gender. However, even within this field, sixteenthcentury women's writing (excluding, of course, Queen Elizabeth and the Countess of Pembroke) still suffers comparative neglect. Admittedly, sixteenth-century women's manuscript writing has been studied in greater detail, but very little has been written about women writers in print, except Anne Askew's Examinations (1546) edited by John Bale. Post theorisation, it has become a fact universally acknowledged that Englishwomen of the sixteenth century wrote only if they were from élite backgrounds, and then mostly of religion and in translation; and that they shied away from publishing their work. The female voice my paper discusses flouts every clause of the above statement. This paper concerns itself with 'Is. W. Gent.' or Isabella Whitney, Gentlewoman, 'Auctor' of two volumes of miscellaneous verse published in 1567 and 1573 respectively. 2 Historical data about this female poet is slender to the point of nonexistence; but exist she does, and emphatically, in the pages of her books. She was probably the sister of Geoffrey Whitney, author of A choice of Emblemes and other Devices (Leiden, 1586). 3 From her poetry it seems that she worked as lady's maid in a wealthy London household until her dismissal due to the malicious gossip of a jealous colleague. After 1573 she vanishes without trace. This shadowy figure, however, is the only surviving non-aristocratic female voice in pre-1600 England interested in making money from the writing and publishing of popular secular verse. My paper will look at the construction of Isabella Whitney's authorial identity through the melancholic pose she adopts in her second book to argue that a voice like hers might contribute to a fuller understanding of the significances and consequences of the chaste, silent and obedient model of female existence in the English Renaissance that has very recently begun to be revised. Whitney as the self-deprecating woman herbalist also inserts a homely recipe at the end of the philosophical flowers to teach us how to use the wisdom contained in them: The Juice of all these Flowers take, and make thee a conserve: And use it first and last: and it will safely thee preserve. 12

Dion Fortune (1890-1946) is one of the most influential figures of 20th century British occultism, although her work remains largely unstudied. Born Violet Mary Firth, Fortune founded an offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1920s, before an argument with Moina Mathers led her start her own magical group, the Society of the Inner Light, which continues to be active today. Fortune published a huge body of work within her lifetime, including books and articles on a number of magical, psychological and social topics, and a series of occult novels (which Fortune believed were her most important magical works). This paper will explore the construction of the Divine Feminine within Fortune’s work, examining how Fortune believed that the worship and embodiment of such a figure could be incorporated into the everyday lives of the British middle classes. The heroine of Fortune's most famous novel, The Sea Priestess, is Vivien la Fey, a powerful occult adept and an autobiographical image of Fortune herself. La Fey embodies the divinity and danger of the Divine Feminine; but the novel also includes a number of passages in which La Fey prepares food for her sacrificial priest. In the most memorable of these she cooks him a feast of white foods, including pale sickle-shaped cakes, in order to invoke the power of the moon. Across all of Fortune’s novels the female protagonist is the most powerful character, but she is also responsible for the every-day chores of physicality. In fact it is the unexpected and comical touches of normality associated with this role – a character commenting that the priest must be chilly in his ceremonial robes, or expressing horror that a supplicant might have missed his tea – that are the most striking moments in Fortune’s novels. Fortune uses this bathos to remind her readers that occultism should not be separated from everyday life, but must become a part of it. This paper will explore how Fortune understood the role of the woman occultist, and how she created an occultism that could be practiced by a normal woman, before preparing her husband’s supper. It will consider how she addressed the disjunction between a powerful divine femininity and the everyday chores of a normal woman by focusing on the absurdity of these interstices. It will examine how Fortune’s fearless drive to make occultism egalitarian led to a complex theology of practice that has implications far beyond the boundaries of its context.

Medieval Feminist Forum, 1999