《純真年代》與《芭比的盛宴》中（不）可能的禮物與好客

Abstract

By following the theories of Marcel Mauss’s study on gift exchange and Jacques Derrida’s impossible gift that stresses the non-reciprocity and impossible hospitality, I attempt to present a reading of The Age of Innocence and Babette’s Feast different from previous interpretations. The first chapter will be a basic survey of Mauss’s theories of gift exchange and Derrida’s arguments of gift and hospitality. I will summarize Mauss’s exchange theory to see how the three obligations of giving, receiving, and reciprocating function in the archaic societies and how the social structure is constituted by these obligations and the behavior of exchange. Inspired by Georges Bataille’s theory of unproductive expenditure, Derrida tries to complicate the issue of gift and hospitality in order to break Mauss’s circular exchange system, which is structured by the three obligations. Both the Derridean gift and the Derridean hospitality are impossible because they are not bound by the pacts of obligations. The absolute gift should be forgotten by donor and donee while the boundary between host and guest becomes tenuous in the absolute hospitality. I will try to demonstrate how these themes are developed in the three critics’ texts. The second chapter will analyze, through the dining scenes, how the characters of The Age of Innocence, are subject to the obligatory rules of gift and hospitality. And the issues of the impossible gift, the absolute hospitality, and the other in Babette’s Feast will be developed in the third chapter. Approaching The Age of Innocence and Babette’s Feast through the perspectives of gift, hospitality, and food, I intend not merely to explicate the implicit significance of the characters’ behavior and motivations but also to explore the fascinating but ignored dimensions of the two texts.