SOURCE: Barr, Marlene. “Food for Postmodern Thought: Isak Dinesen's Female Artists as Precursors to Contemporary Feminist Fabulators.”¹ In Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, edited by Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin, pp. 21-33. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Barr theorizes on the importance of Isak Dinesen's works as precursors to postmodern feminist writing.]

In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson comments, “I am very far indeed from believing that any of the most significant postmodern artists—John Cage, John Ashbery, Philippe Sollers, Robert Wilson, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Michael Snow, even Samuel Beckett himself—are in any sense schizophrenics” (118). My purpose in citing Jameson is not to take issue with his statement, but rather to make a simple observation: his list of “the most significant postmodern artists” does not include female postmodern artists. As we are all aware by now, women are omitted from “most significant” lists through no fault of their own; their contributions are either trivialized or subverted. Such has been the fate of our American female creators of postmodern fiction, our contemporary “lost” women writers. It is time to announce that these “lost” writers have been found.

In order to locate female postmodern writers, we must look towards feminist speculative fiction: the science fiction, fantasy, and utopian literature created by such writers as Joanna Russ, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Octavia Butler. Feminist speculative fiction is replete with visions which are disconcerting to the patriarchy (planets populated by lesbian separatists, for example). The patriarchal literary establishment successfully has used the term “speculative fiction” to nullify these disconcerting visions. “Speculative fiction,” “fantasy,” and “utopian literature” are all synonyms for “noncanonical literature.” Hence, I have proposed a new term which does not bar female speculative fiction writers from assuming their rightful place in the postmodern literary canon: feminist fabulation.²

I define this term as a specifically feminist corollary to Robert Scholes's “structural fabulation.”³ Structural fabulation addresses man's place within the system of the universe; feminist fabulation addresses woman's place within the system of patriarchy. It modifies the tradition of speculative fiction with an awareness that patriarchy is a contrived system, a meaning-making machine which constructs and defines patriarchal fictions—myths of female inferiority—as integral aspects of human culture, and the insights of this century's waves of feminism are accepted as fictional points of departure. It is a fictional exploration of woman's inferior status, made perceptible by the implications of recent feminist theory.

Jean Baudrillard's comment about systems addresses the critical establishment's failure to articulate the juncture between feminist fabulation and postmodernism:

Each system … forms a sort of ecological niche where the essential thing is to maintain a relational decor, where all the terms must continually communicate among themselves and stay in contact, informed of the respective condition of the others and of the system as a whole, where opacity, resistance or the secrecy of a single term can lead to catastrophe.

(127-28)

Feminist fabulation has been ostracized from the postmodern literary niche, prevented from communicating with and as postmodernism, denied access to the canonical system. The politics of literary interpretation resists feminist fabulation and relegates the identities of female postmodern writers to the status of secrecy. This secrecy, the marginalization of an entire category of writers—James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Jody Scott, Vonda McIntyre, Suzy McKee Charnas, Elizabeth A. Lynn, and Pamela Sargent, for example—is an aesthetic catastrophe.

One way to end this catastrophic silencing of feminist voices is to establish that these voices are not speaking in isolation. Towards this end, I argue that the fantastic elements in the devalued work of contemporary feminist fabulators also are present in their modern predecessors. This essay's concentration upon Isak Dinesen's portrayal of the female artist figure in “Babette's Feast,” as well as my brief concluding remarks about “The Blank Page,” shows that a modern woman writer reserves space for space fiction. These stories exemplify a direct relationship between modernists and feminist fabulators. They indicate that postmodern women writers' turn to speculative fiction has not been preceded by the blank page of women's silence on the subject.

Dinesen is one who laid the groundwork for contemporary feminist fabulation. In “Babette's Feast,” an implied feminist utopia,⁴ Dinesen's presentation of the female artist juxtaposes feminism with the fantastic and establishes her as a modernist literary mother who engenders fabulative postmodern daughters.

The story indicates that the fantastic is an appropriate mode for feminist fiction. Its beginning includes a description of “a Huldre, a female mountain spirit of Norway” (25-26). Babette is analogous to this spirit in that she is a female alien, a French woman who enters the home of two unmarried sisters residing in the Norwegian town of Berlevaag. The sisters associate her with the marvelous: “[t]hey felt that their cook's old carpetbag was made from a magic carpet; at a given moment she might mount it and be carried off, back to Paris” (38). Babette is a magical alien who soon becomes an integral part of the sisters' familial female community.

Despite the incongruity of a French maid appearing in an austere Norwegian household, Babette adapts to her new environment. The atmosphere surrounding her becomes welcoming rather than estranging: “The old Brothers and Sisters, who had first looked askance at the foreign woman in their midst, felt a happy change in their little sisters' life, rejoiced at it and benefited by it” (37). Babette's actions encourage this positive reception. After winning ten thousand francs, instead of choosing to become an image of French elegance supported by a French lottery—an action which would re-estrange her from her newfound community—Babette uses the money in a feminist manner. She literally nourishes the community when she creates her feast, a work of art which at once celebrates her substantial talents and serves the needs of the group.

As the ingredients arrive, both Babette and her feast are allied to the world of the fantastic. Robert Langbaum has pointed out that the narrator alludes to witchcraft in describing Babette's work as she cooks (Langbaum 251). I would add that the story's imagery also evokes the alien and the monstrous:

… Babette, like the bottled demon of the fairy tale, had swelled and grown to such dimensions that her mistresses felt small before her. They now saw the French dinner coming upon them, a thing of incalculable nature and range. … In the light of the lamp it [a turtle to be cooked for dinner] looked like some greenish-black stone, but when set down on the kitchen floor it suddenly shot out a snake-like head … this thing was monstrous in size and terrible to behold.

(45-46)

Babette becomes a swelled unearthly demon, a gigantic monster; the dinner is an alien “thing.” All the elements of a mediocre science fiction film are metaphorically present here. The dinner prepared by the monstrous Babette could be described on a movie marquee as the attack of the thing that will eventually be eaten in Berlevaag. As an art form, Babette's creation of the alien dinner is akin to the art of feminist fabulation, which produces literature whose alien ingredients are concocted by the female imagination. As the monstrous dinner must be accepted, ingested, and appreciated by the traditional Norwegian community, feminist fabulation is the monstrous genre which must be canonized by the traditional academic literary community.

The story implies that, like quilts sewn by American pioneer women, Babette's feast should be viewed as a respected and valued art form. As a master chef, Babette has taken cooking, a part of the domestic female tradition, and manipulated it successfully in the public, masculine world of Parisian gastronomy. Her dual roles as master chef and domestic cook suggest the inappropriateness of evaluating art in terms of gender classifications. Babette, a revolutionary activist, a family cook, and a chef for aristocrats, is not concerned primarily with the moral effect her work may have on any audience. Rather than focusing upon being classified as a chef or a cook, Babette wishes to create as perfect a work as she can. Her skillful execution of both her public and her domestic cooking roles emphasizes that successful nontraditional art works such as pioneers' quilts, Babette's feast, and feminist fabulation should not be undervalued. Her feast is a transcendent experience, a personal and religious communicative rebirth:

Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. … They [the guests] only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light. … Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.

(61)

Babette's dinner coincides with a new manifestation of time, a change in the reflective properties of the window glass, and a merger of metal and art. The feast, then, is an art form initiating a world alien to the one we know, a world which defies natural laws. The event also improves the community's social relationships: “The two old women who had once slandered each other now in their hearts went back a long way, past the evil period in which they had been stuck, to those days of their early girlhood when together they had been preparing for confirmation and hand in hand had filled the roads round Berlevaag with singing” (61). Like the feast, feminist fabulation presents the possibility of new physical worlds and new mutual social respect. Both the feast and feminist fabulation are particularly female art forms which introduce new psychic and physical spaces.

The two present new possibilities. The story's congregation, for example, enjoys the following experience: “The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their [the congregation's] eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millenium … tonight I [General Loewenhielm] have learned … that in this world anything is possible” (62). In feminist fabulative works, vain patriarchal illusions about women—men's constructions of reality—dissolve; space is cleared for a new female vision of the universe (which might be how the universe really is). “Babette's Feast” has established a foundation for the eventual appearance of literature depicting women's worlds (such as the stories published in Virginia Kidd's Millenial Women). Dinesen prepares a space for the literature that allows women and men to learn that in this world—or in other worlds—anything is possible, reality can be declared a fiction, and women's stories can inspire the construction of a nonpatriarchal society.

It is, of course, difficult to replace patriarchy with feminism. Feminists, like all artists working in noncanonical forms, and feminist art are often misunderstood and unappreciated. Despite this lack of acceptance, however, we must do our best. Langbaum points out that Babette pursues her art in the face of misunderstanding: “She had … to do her best even though no-one at the dinner—she did not foresee the General's appearance—would understand what she had accomplished” (Langbaum 254). Babette's artistic accomplishment is comprehended because of the unexpected appearance of a male. Ironically, because of his experience in the alien Parisian culinary world, a powerful male general is the person best equipped to understand Babette's achievement. His presence communicates a positive view of relationships between men and women, a view asserted in recent feminist utopias such as Pamela Sargent's The Shore of Women.⁵ The novel's presentation of a woman and a man inhabiting the same space with mutual dignity implies that the sexes can step out of their respective environments. Babette and General Loewenhielm, like Sargent's protagonists, for example, experience new social worlds. Babette moves from the excessiveness of Paris to the austerity of Berlevaag; he moves from Berlevaag to Paris. They come together at the table, a particular artistic space where women and men can coexist. Sargent and some of her fellow contemporary feminist utopian writers imply that men should seat themselves at such a table.

The diners at Babette's table enjoy a “kind of celestial second childhood.” They are “bodily as well as spiritually hand in hand” during a time when the “stars have come nearer” (63). In terms of feminist fabulation, this passage hints that people can attain solidarity when they come nearer to the stars, when they engage with feminist space fiction. The fantastic elements of Dinesen's dinner scene indicate that feminist fabulation is an appropriate space for feminist writers and readers. This literature of the stars is not always inferior to that of the literary mainstream.

As the title of the story's twelfth section (“The Great Artist”) and Babette herself proclaim, she is in fact a great artist. Her feast validates domestic cooking as an art form and celebrates utopian goals. She indicates that feminist fabulators who use art as she does, to advocate women's utopian concerns, should also be considered great artists, not inhabitants of a female subgeneric literary ghetto. Patriarchy works against the recognition of women artists, however. Babette's repetition of a remark made by the story's musician (Monsieur Achille Papin) indirectly comments upon this fact: “‘Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!’” (68). The politics of patriarchal interpretation seek to silence feminist fabulators by marginalizing and trivializing their work.

At the conclusion of the story, Babette's body is “like a marble monument” (68) (like one of Arthur C. Clarke's monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey), a marker attesting to the location and significance of feminist art. Langbaum states that “as marble monument, Babette symbolizes Achille and art” (Langbaum 254). Such female art also is an Achilles heel of patriarchal reality—the patriarchy's vulnerable point, where alternative versions of reality can be expressed. Defining feminist fabulation as an integral part of the postmodern canon and so ending the fiction of its subgeneric status can heighten the patriarchy's vulnerability by sparking interest in creating a woman-oriented reality.

The story's concluding words signal the hope of such an occurrence: “Yet this is not the end! … In Paradise you [Babette] will be the great artist that God meant you to be! … how you will enchant the angels!” (68). In other words, the story is not the end, but rather one beginning of respect for female art forms. In Paradise, Babette will be recognized as a great artist. She will enchant the angels, who are, for instance, exemplified by the heavenly community of women in Sandi Hall's The Godmothers. Langbaum's interpretation of the story's conclusion complements my own. He writes, “Now she [Phillipa, one of the sisters] understands what food it is that is symbolized by Babette's food. She understands how art unites heaven and earth” (Langbaum 254). An appreciation of women's art (symbolized by Babette's feast) can infuse the earthly patriarchal society with the utopia that feminist fabulators locate in the stars.

Indeed, the stars seem to come nearer. When Babette's guests leave her dinner, stars falling to earth in the form of snow impede them: “In the street the snow was lying so deep that it had become difficult to walk. The guests … staggered, sat down abruptly or fell forward … and were covered with snow, as if they had indeed had their sins washed white as wool, and in this regained innocent attire were gamboling like little lambs” (63). This imagery implies that the human race has a new innocence, a potential for social rebirth. The sisters' father states, “‘God's paths run across the sea and the snowy mountains, where man's eye sees no track’” (30). The guests cannot make tracks in their own streets. Man's eye, the patriarchal gaze, is stopped in its own tracks. It is time, as feminist fabulation tells us, to gambol upon the goddess whose paths run across the sky and the starry galaxies. It is time to try to see the goddess's path, to place feminist tracks in the new space of unearthly reality. “Babette's Feast,” collected in Shadows of Destiny, is an anecdote about the destiny of respect for feminist art forms and feminist social structures. It is a modern literary space which anticipates the presence of postmodern feminist fabulators.

“The Blank Page,” which focuses upon the potential for female artists to fill unused and/or subversive female artistic spaces with new art forms, functions similarly. A brief consideration of this story serves as an appropriate coda to my point: the juxtaposition of domestic art with the fantastic in “Babette's Feast” is a modern precursor to feminist fabulation. “The Blank Page” directly addresses the dilemma of the feminist fabulator's creation of a specifically female art form which does not coincide with traditional art. The story emphasizes that to gain power, women must behave in a manner which is alien to femininity; they must write their own stories.

Within the story, a blood-stained bridal sheet becomes female art, a painting created with body fluid. The framed, stained sheets, which attest that the virgin bride conforms to the patriarchal story of proper female behavior, exemplify women's art as signifier of patriarchal definitions. The virgin has spent her life as a powerless, sexless blank page.

Dinesen, however, also enables the blank page to serve women's needs, to symbolize woman's potential and power rather than her hopelessness and powerlessness. The framed bloodless white sheet which appears as “snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page” (104) is a positive blank page. The bride who slept on it does not fit patriarchal stories; her sheet-as-canvas is blank rather than literally drawn from the patriarchal definition of her own blood. This blank sheet becomes an appropriate symbol for new female art forms. Feminist fabulators, for example, stand before patriarchally unsullied blank pages and fill them as they see fit. They are fettered only by the limits of their own imaginations, not by the limiting definitions constructed by patriarchal imaginations.

Feminist fabulators confront the blank pages of feminist potential, find patriarchal reality too constricting, and create fantastic tales of women's worlds. They choose to fill the space of the blank page with space fiction. Like Dinesen, they allow the word “blank” to have positive connotations for women. For Dinesen and the feminist fabulator, “blank” becomes a positive absence, freedom from patriarchal influence, freedom to be female artists who do not tell patriarchal stories. “Babette's Feast” and “The Blank Page” allow the feminist fabulator to know that she is not creating art in subgeneric isolation. Instead of being a devalued creator of inferior fiction, she is the postmodern descendant of a modern woman writer who chose to link feminism with the fantastic. The feminist fabulator, then, inherits past female artistic culture and creates present female artistic culture. She is no orphaned subcultural artistic outcast.

The feminist fabulator is freed, in Susan Gubar's words, from the “model of the pen-penis on the virgin page,” a tradition which “excludes women from the creation of culture” (77):

[W]ere the female community less sensitive to the significance of these signs [remnants of women's lives], such stained sheets would not be considered art at all. Dinesen implies that woman's use of her own body in the creation of art results in forms of expression devalued or totally invisible to eyes trained by traditional aesthetic standards. She also seems to imply that, within the life of domesticity assigned the royal princess from birth, the body is the only accessible medium for self-expression.

(Gubar 78-79)

Feminist fabulation is hardly considered art at all. The critical community has only recently begun to be sensitive to its significance. Critical eyes trained to traditional aesthetic standards are blind to the importance of this literature.

Such readers fail to see that, like Dinesen's princess, the characters created by feminist fabulators also use their bodies to create art. Feminist fabulators make the female body an expansive and powerful, rather than a limiting and powerless, means of self-expression. In fact, many feminist fabulators recreate the female body in a manner which transcends biological limitations and present female protagonists who derive power from inhabiting bodies which differ from our own. For example, Russ, Tiptree, and Charnas imagine women who can reproduce without men. These writers, like Pygmalion (whose myth is cited at the start of Gubar's discussion), build their own versions of women.

Feminist fabulators are female Pygmalions who use words to sculpt new versions of the female body. They create art objects and cultures to correct the fact that “in terms of the production of culture, she [woman] is an art object … not the sculptor” (Gubar 74). When the literary establishment devalues feminist fabulation, it removes the scalpel from the hands of the female writer-sculptor. It denies these new female Pygmalions the power to be female artists whose words produce diverse, fantastic images of female bodies. Dinesen insists that Babette's dinner is a legitimate art form which literally and figuratively nourishes the body of her Norwegian community. The postmodern version of this insistence takes the form of the feminist fabulator providing food for feminist thought—nourishing the contemporary feminist community—by producing fantastic visions of female biology and feminist futures.

Like the princess's blank sheet, feminist fabulation tells a different, nonpatriarchal story about women. In Gubar's terms, the feminist fabulator creates “a radically new kind of art” (92) “by not writing what she is expected to write” (89). Feminist fabulation, which is presently “devalued as mere craft or service” (Gubar 90), can, like the “snow-white sheet of the nameless princess … promise a breakthrough into new beginnings for new stories that can soothe the wound” patriarchy inflicts upon women (Gubar 88).

Even so, instead of being respected as the valued site of new feminist stories, feminist fabulation itself has become a wound. A bloody blank appears at the space where feminist fabulation has been wrenched from the canon. Critics might soothe this wound by validating female artists who choose to write in this mode. Critics could correct the fact that, in regard to the postmodern canon, feminist fabulation is “the blank place” (Gubar 91). This place might be filled by a contemporary female art form which represents “readiness for inspiration and creation, the self conceived and dedicated to its own potential divinity” (Gubar 91).

Feminist fabulators are postmodern Babettes, female artists who treat readers to feasts of words. Yet traditional aesthetic standards restrict the consumption of these treats, define them as forbidden fruit, the female blank pages absent from the canon. Like Babette's feast, feminist fabulation—women's creation of nourishment for a feminist body of knowledge—is a viable art form. Fat is a feminist issue. So is a traditional literary diet, in which readers avoid indulging in fabulative food for postmodern thought. In the manner of Babette, feminist fabulators should be defined as respected artists, the creators of a female art form; feminist fabulation, until now a blank page in the postmodern canonical menu, should appear in all its savory and subtle variety.

Notes

1. This essay will be adapted for inclusion in my forthcoming book, Feminist Fabulation: Women's Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press). I view feminist fabulation as a postmodern, metafictional exploration of patriarchy's fictionality. When feminist fabulators use language to construct nonsexist fictional worlds, they create useful models to learn how patriarchy is constructed. Feminist fabulation is postmodern literature which facilitates an understanding of sexism as a constructed fiction that is authored by men's power to make women the protagonists of patriarchal fiction.

2. For a discussion of feminist fabulation, see my “Feminist Fabulation; Or, Playing with Patriarchy, Versus the Masculinization of Metafiction.”

3. Scholes explains that “in works of structural fabulation the tradition of speculative fiction is modified by an awareness of the nature of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures, and the insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points of departure. … It is a fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science” (54-55).

4. Sarah Webster Goodwin's 1987 MLA presentation, “Feminism: Implicit and Explicit Utopias,” first acquainted me with the notion that “Babette's Feast” can be read as an implicit feminist utopia. Her essay in this volume is a later version of that paper.

5. The following recent feminist utopias also portray positive relationships between women and men: Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, Marge Piercy's Woman On the Edge of Time, and Joan Slonczewski's A Door Into Ocean.

Works Cited

Barr, Marleen S. “Feminist Fabulation; Or, Playing with Patriarchy Versus the Masculinization of Metafiction,” Women's Studies 14 (1987):187-91.

———. Feminist Fabulation: Women's Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, forthcoming.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays On Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, pp. 126-33. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983.

Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: New American Library, 1968.

Dinesen, Isak. “Babette's Feast.” In Anecdotes of Destiny, pp. 23-68. New York: Random House, 1958.

———. “The Blank Page.” In Last Tales, pp. 99-105. New York: Random House, 1957.

Goodwin, Sarah Webster. “Feminism: Implicit and Explicit Utopias.” In Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative.

Gubar, Susan. “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity.” In Writing and Sexual Difference, edited by Elizabeth Abel, pp. 73-93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Hall, Sandi. The Godmothers. London: The Women's Press, 1982.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays On Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, pp. 111-25. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983.

Kidd, Virginia. Millennial Women. New York: Dell, 1978.

Langbaum, Robert. The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art New York: Random House, 1964.

Lessing, Doris. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five New York: Random House, 1980.

Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Sargent, Pamela. The Shore of Women. New York: Crown, 1986.

Scholes, Robert. “The Roots of Science Fiction.” In Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mark Rose, pp. 46-56. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976.

Slonczewski, Joan. A Door Into Ocean. New York: Avon, 1986.