In “The Diver,” the first story in Isak Dinesen's Anecdotes of Destiny, a young Softa (student) of the Koran decides to imitate the angels by imitating the creatures most like them: the birds. By learning to fly with homemade wings, he can learn, like the angels, to see the universe from above. Those in power, worried by the “new and revolutionary things” that the angels may tell the Softa, take advantage of his insufficient knowledge of the “real world, in which dreams are tested” (6), to undermine him. They hire a young dancing-girl to impersonate an angel and then to seduce him. Since his “unexpended vigor” makes him a great lover, however, the dancing-girl becomes fond of him and resentful of her employers. She tells him the truth and adds: “You cannot expect a dancing girl to be an angel” (10). Disillusioned, he leaves the village.

In the second part of the story, the storyteller tells of his travels to the villages of the pearl-fishers, where he collects tales that he compares to pearls: as “disease turned into loveliness,” as secrets “transparent and opaque” at the same time (12). He hears of a man named Elnazred, whose great happiness on land is earned by his “demoniacal” ability to dive to greater depths than the other fishermen and to bring up the finest pearls. This famous diver turns out to be the Softa, who has gone to the bottom of the sea and learned wisdom from the fish. Since the fish, however, have never fallen—have never, for example, tasted the burning pain of love—their wisdom is smug and limited: it will “please the men of business and their wives” (16). The implication is that the Softa has gone from naive idealism to bourgeois smugness (Stambaugh 182).

Structuring this story are plot elements that we find also in “The Ring” and “Babette's Feast”: a desire for transcendence (represented by the motifs of birds and angels); a fall (or its refusal) caused by the “real world” in which “dreams are tested”; and either new knowledge or resignation, true art or its simulacrum. In “The Ring” Lise, a young, wealthy newlywed wife, muses over her happiness. Unlike the Softa, who wants to transcend everyday life through converse with an angel, Lise feels like the angel herself: the “distant paradise” she shares with her husband has “descended to earth” and is “filled with the things of everyday life” (235). If the artist, as we are told in “The Diver,” seeks secrets from the depths, our domestic angel finds freedom in the fact that she has no secret from her husband, whom she wants to obey in everything. Though she does everything “gravely and solicitously,” she knows that she is playing (236). Like the fish in “The Diver,” who are “upheld and supported on all sides” (17), Lise lacks gravity. Unlike the veiled dancer in “The Diver,” who understands how the world works, she has no interest in the real world. From time to time, however, a blush—a version of the “burning” decried by the fish in “The Diver”—unveils her innermost being. When this diffusion of blood occurs in the outside world, where it betokens the need and mortality she has ignored, she is humanized.

A thief, hungry and desperate, has killed and taken a sheep and killed a man who tried to stop him. When the sheepmaster compares the thief to a wolf, Lise remembers pleasurably the wolf in “Little Red Ridinghood,” but she criticizes her husband for sympathizing with the thief. Like those in power in “The Diver,” she fears “revolutionary” ideas (238). As she walks back to the house, she surveys a landscape that for her is full of promise. Still playing at life, she decides to hide from her husband to make him feel “what a void” life would be without her. Hiding in a “narrow space like a small alcove” that she finds in the woods (239), she discovers, however, someone very foreign to her make-believe world: the beleaguered thief. During a silent exchange of looks, she sees herself with his eyes and discovers that life is both more and less than imagined promises.

The thief makes a gesture that is both threatening and sexual: “He moved his right arm till it hung down straight before him between his legs. Without lifting the hand he bent the wrist and slowly raised the point of the knife till it pointed at her throat” (241). While she offers him her wedding ring—in the hope he will disappear and allow her to pretend that he never was—he takes her handkerchief and wraps it round his knife, which he fits into its sheath. Then he closes his eyes and frees her.

She is no longer free, however, as she was when she had no secret and wanted only to obey her doting husband. She loses her wedding ring, which the thief discards in the woods, but finds in its loss an emblem of life's limits: “With this lost ring she had wedded herself to something. To what? To poverty, persecution, total loneliness. To the sorrows and the sinfulness of this earth” (244). While “The Diver” goes beyond the Softa's fall to his subsequent but premature equilibrium, “The Ring” ends with the heroine's fall—into material scarcity, sexuality, and death.

“Babette's Feast” begins in a place that resembles Lise's alcove: in the “long narrow arm of the sea” that is the story's setting. The town associated with the fjord reminds one of Lise's play world, looking “like a child's toy-town of little wooden pieces painted gray, yellow, pink and many other colors” (23). However, the two sisters with whom the story occupies itself are far from frivolous; they and the other members of their father's sect renounce the pleasures of this world, which they hold as illusions, and long for the New Jerusalem. Though the sisters are admirable among Dinesen's women for their lack of disguise or pretense, their unthinking obedience to their father and their fear of life outside their fjord make them, like Lise, shallow. In fact, when the story begins, the father is dead, but they and the others still draw on his personality, which is now “evaporating” (39).

Though untouched, like the fish in “The Diver,” by “the flames of this world” (25), the sisters have had their opportunities. Martine once captured the heart of a profligate young officer, Lorens Loewenhielm, who, like the Softa in “The Diver,” wanted a “gentle, golden-haired angel to guide and reward him” (26). The Softa had intercourse—both verbal and sexual—with his presumed angel but could not accept her as a human being. Lorens found nothing to say to his. Feeling more and more “insignificant and contemptible,” he finally relinquished his ideal: “I have learned here that fate is hard, and that in this world there are things which are impossible!” (27). Like the Softa, moreover, he gained worldly success, but unlike the Softa he continued to doubt the wisdom of his choice. Philippa's admirer was Achille Papin, a famous singer from Paris who was visiting Norway. Unlike Lorens, who could not express his love, Achille expressed his, but only by means of Mozart's Don Giovanni. That expression led to his dismissal. Though the sisters, unfallen, continued to read and interpret “the Word,” they never found words of their own to interpret their worldly experiences. And neither imagined that the other had been “surprised and frightened by something in her own nature” (32).

Into this world—as narrow in its way as Lise's—comes another foreigner, Babette, who reminds us of Lise's comments about her husband's “revolutionary” tendencies. Babette has been a Communard in the short-lived revolution of 1871 and has lost all she possessed. She arrives in Berluraag with a letter of introduction from Achille Papin, who recalls to the sisters his failure of fifteen years before and writes to Philippa that in Paradise she will sing, “without fears or scruples, as God meant [her] to sing” (34). Fulfilled as a great artist, she will enchant the angels. Babette, he adds, “can cook”—one of the great understatements in world literature. It is Babette who, without waiting for Paradise, will create “without fears or scruples.” If the sisters are shallow, Babette is “deep”: “In the soundings of her being there were passions, there were memories and longings of which they [the sisters] knew nothing at all” (38); and that is why she, not Philippa, is the artist. Like the thief in “The Ring,” who, ragged and injured, conquers Lise by the magnetic power of hard experience, Babette has “magnetic qualities” (35). Like the Softa in “The Diver,” she has lost everything, but unlike the Softa she has lost it through social idealism—idealism, in fact, that contradicts her personal interests. Though the Softa regains his fortune, its worth is problematic. When Babette wins the French lottery, she becomes “strangely collected” (44) as she prepares to expend both her fortune and herself in a work of art.

When the foreign Babette first appears, the narrator says of the people's alarm and then acceptance, “The stone which the builders had almost refused had become the headstone of the corner” (37). One is reminded of Luke 20:17: “The very stone which the builders rejected has become the headstone of the corner.” Unlike Christ, Babette is not rejected, but her alarming (=foreign) aspects again come to the fore when she prepares a French meal for the brothers and sisters of the sect. Of the ingredients she brings back from France, the most alarming one is a turtle: “in the light of the lamp it looked like some greenish-black stone,” which emits, however, “a snake-like head” (45; emphasis mine). While the “stone” reminds us of the “headstone of the corner”—almost rejected but cautiously accepted—the “snake-like head” suggests the serpent in Eden, and the foreign knowledge it imparts.

In this crisis, the old people decide to partake of the meal but to say nothing about it. Though the tongue is an “unruly evil, full of deadly poison,” they anticipate a day on which their master will “purify them of all delight or disgust of the senses” and cleanse their tongues of all taste (46-47). One of their number is well on the way toward that goal since she is “stonedeaf” and has “lost all sense of smell or taste” (47). In these straitened circumstances, then, Babette displays her culinary genius, which opens up the sensibilities of those she serves: “Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it” (61).

The only guest at dinner who can consciously appreciate Babette's art is Lorens Loewenhielm, now General Loewenhielm, who is visiting again in the vicinity. His breast covered with decorations, he struts and shines “like an ornamental bird, a golden pheasant or a peacock” (50-51), but unlike the artist he cannot fly. Intending to dominate the conversation of the dinner table, he is silenced by Babette's art, which recreates miraculously the social harmony that has been lost since the father's death.

Babette combines in herself the idealism of the young Lorens, the worldly knowledge of the General, and the self-abnegation of the guests. The guests believe that one eats and drinks in the right spirit only if one has “firmly renounced all ideas of food and drink” (58). Babette renounced such ideas when she fought against the only people who could understand her culinary genius. The guests believe that “the only things which we may take with us from our life on earth are those which we have given away!” (59). To produce her art, Babette gives away everything. “Through all the world,” she says, “there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost” (68).

Babette, then, is a Lise who has not only encountered life's limits but has also lost everything she had in trying to change some of them—through social revolution. In her new situation, moreover, she refuses, as Thomas Whissen points out, to find anything negative about her frugal conditions: “She splits cod and makes beer soup with the same care with which she later prepares cailles en sarcophage and turtle soup” (43). Her art, then, overcomes communal squabbles and fearful resistance to create a moment of grace and harmony. As for herself, Babette says, “A great artist … is never poor” (67). In contrast with Babette, the titular character of “The Diver,” the erstwhile Softa, replenishes his wealth with almost effortless ease. Unlike Babette, who has participated in great historical events, the diver has no story to tell: “What happened to me … after I left Shiraz, makes no story at all” (16). Though he brings up the finest pearls from the depths, the art they represent is shallow—the kind of stuff with which one diverts businessmen and their wives. Unlike Babette, whose art—infused with a mature and caring spirit—creates social equilibrium, the diver's equilibrium is his own.

Works Cited

Dinesen, Isak. Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. New York: Vintage, 1985.

Stambaugh, Sara. “Imagery of Entrapment in the Fiction of Isak Dinesen.” Scandinavica 22.2 (November 1983): 182.

Whissen, Thomas. Isak Dinesen's Aesthetics. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1973.