Literature concepts and critical analysis

Eat, Drink, and (Don't) be Merry: A comparison and contrast of Babette and Sophie

Food and drink are two of the great pleasures and reliefs of life's cares -- along with love. So suggests the character of Babette from Isak Dinesen's short story "Babette's Feast" and Sophie from the novel Razors Edge by Somerset Maugham. But food ultimately has the power to sustain the soul, while drink, although it may provide a temporary respite, ultimately can only kill what is good inside of a person. Both Babette and Sophie are symbolic and minor, rather than fully fleshed out characters, which enable different characters in the novel to establish connections between one another that they otherwise would not have been able to. For instance, Babette's decision to have a feast brings together the elder sisters whom she serves with the rest of their surrounding community. She creates a sense of community and love with the grace of her meal where before there was no such community. Sophie's tragic death brings together the American ex-G.I. Larry and the mendacious Isabel, out of a mutual sense of guilt. But the means by which such connections are established are positive in Babette's sense, and negative in Sophie's, and this is reflected in the nature of the relationships the sacrifices of both women spawn.

Babette of Dinesen's "Babette's Feast" begins the tale as a woman acting as a servant to an ascetic and repressed family of unmarried women. She is a Frenchwoman, an alien to the community both in her nationality and in her spirit. But her French delights in good food come to the surface when she receives an inheritance. One might assume she would use this inheritance to escape. But she does not. Rather, she uses it to educate the family in what a real meal tastes like. For too long she has been forced to serve poor food, not because the family is financially impoverished, but because they wish to deny the needs of the body out of spiritual convictions.

These spiritual convictions are unnecessary, suggests the more sensual French Babette. Babette brings joy to the household, because of her financial largess, rather than joy to herself. For, as a result of her financial windfall, Babette makes a shocking request -- she asks to cook a sumptuous meal for the family, in defiance of their usual religious protocols. On this one feast, Babette squanders all of her money, and also all of her hopes of leaving the town and returning home. But by lavishing so much on a transient yet nourishing substance, Babette's act of gift giving in time, funds, and food essentially heals the hearts and souls of all the sisters of the house, and all of those in the surrounding community.

In contrast, Sophie of Razor's Edge creates a negative connection between two spiritually bankrupt people, after she exists the novel, as both commiserate in guilt over her death. In some sense, Sophie is an emotional and sensual creature like Babette. She similarly makes use of an intoxicating delight, that of the drink of alcohol. To fund her habit, she later becomes a prostitute. But alcohol and dissipation takes the woman's life, rather than preserves her life and joy in the world around her. Sophie uses alcohol to escape life, much as the sisters of Dinesen's tale use asceticism to escape from and deny life and pleasure, because they find life confusing, frightening, and because life holds the potential to bring pain and loss rather than delight.

Thus rather than using her love of drink to sustain others, Sophie uses alcohol to escape from others, and to cut herself off from feeling, something she fears after the death of her husband and child. She is an addict, rather than someone who uses her substance of choice to connect herself to the lives of others, as Babette does with her expertise and love of food. Although the self-denying sisters who insist upon consuming poor food that Babette must indulge may seem a far cry away from Sophie, essentially both are different extremes of selfishness. Sophie collapses after the death of her husband and her child, physically and spiritually. She returns to the momentary pleasures of addiction, seeking destruction. Her actions ultimately leave Larry alone in the world, while Isabel, who essentially encouraged Sophie to try drinking again after the woman was attempting to recover from her sickness, now has Larry all to herself -- for better or for worse.

Sophie's addiction confirms to Larry that life is purposeless, an idea that he first conceived during his wartime service. Likewise, Babette's foolish sacrifice confirms a truth for the religious community in which she dwells, but a positive truth for the religious community of ascetics of the village she can now never leave, having lost her available funds. Through her great sacrifice Babette shows that grace comes in mysterious ways, like a pearl of a great price that was earned in exchange for everything a man or woman might possess. Babette shows that faith can come through acts of joy and taste in worldly, bodily delights of joy, rather than denying such joy.