Radical Sisterhood: Rereading the Short Story and Film Versions of Isak Dinesen’s Religious Refugee Parable ‘Babette’s Feast’

Reading the written and film versions of Isak Dinesen’s ‘Babette’s Feast’ together, as texts in dialogue, offers deeper insight into this religious refugee parable and the spiritually rooted friendship, or sisterhood-philia, between its three central female characters. This is a relationship that is often overlooked by critics. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s thoughts about friendship, particularly his observation that there has been a ‘double exclusion of the feminine’ from the historical and philosophical canon, in this article I argue that, through comparative close reading of the 1950 short story and the 1987 film of the Babette story, both Dinesen and film director Gabriel Axel contribute narratives that challenge the male centred tradition which has historically silenced the possibility of friendship between women.