For a novel written in the 1770s, it is remarkably modern in ways it addresses what are still very real issues. Diderot’s novel began life as a hoax to lure a friend back to Paris from his country estate. He invented the story of a young girl named Marie-Suzanne Simonin , who was the result of a adulterous affair by her mother. Resented by her ‘father’, she is thus rejected by a mother who is anxious to restore her favour with her husband. Suzanne is forced into a nunnery at 18 years of age in order to get rid of an embarrassment and to favour her older sisters hungry to inherit their mother’s estate. They are starkly contrasted with Suzanne, who submissively sacrifices her life in order to enable her mother to sustain her respectable front.
Suzanne has no vocation for being a nun and protests about it all her life. But to no avail. She complains to her self-centred mother, to her confessor and to abbesses. They all manipulate her into submission, with no real sympathy for the injustice of her situation. Her attempt to make a public speech about the evils of getting rid of unwanted daughters into nunneries is squashed by some damage-control by senior nuns.
She is transferred to a new nunnery because she has musical talent. Her novice years yield her best time of her life, but a year after taking her vows, her mother, her ‘father’ and the sympathetic abbess all die. From that point on, her life takes a turn for the worst, the new abbess, Sainte-Christine, brings a new order. The favourites of the old order never remain the favourites of the following reign.
Suzanne’s resistance to scourges and hair shirts bring only sadistic repression. A regime of vicious persecution is implemented with the co-operation of nearly all the subordinate nuns. They are presented by the author as willing enforcers, each competing to show more cruelty in mockery and persecution than the others. Every minute aspects of the administrator reinforces the power divide between the abbess and inmates who are systematically humiliated and stripped of dignity and any shred of privacy.
The nuns make Suzanne eat her meals on the floor of the refectory. Some nuns spread broken glass on the floor of the corridor leading to her cell, after stealing her shoes, and throw toilet waste at her as she passes their doors. Although Suzanne is driven close to suicide, she receives protection from one loyal friend in the nobility. She writes a detailed account of her persecution. Realising the damage impending if her story becomes public, the abbess and her minions panic and call in the Vicar-General who investigates thoroughly and scathingly condemns the abbess for their cruelty.
In the end, nothing changes. She endures a fresh round of retaliatory persecution, labelling her an agent of Satan, eventually transferring her to another convent where she encounters a similar but different problem. The abbess there is a lesbian who exerts strong favouritism, fostering intense bitchy and hysterical jealousies between new and discarded favourites.
The whole of Diderot’s novel is not devoted to an attack on Catholic Christianity, as Suzanne is portrayed as a fervently pious young woman. His critique is directed, considering he was an advocate for Enlightenment, to the unnatural hothouse relationships that develop in authoritarian convents. In these dysfunctional settings, it is not the church, but the personal idiosyncrasies of the abbess that determine whether the convent culture manifests as healthy or sick. He is also protesting against a legal system that reinforces such systemic viciousness.
The issues in Diderot’s novel focus a bright illumination on the repeated bastardisation in the armed forces, prisons and the persecution of whistleblowers, such as Mary Mckillop, who was excommunicated for exposing sexual abuse of children by a priest. Today, abuse of minors remains a very modern issue. His novel pleads, in effect, for all people to have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as in the charter of the American Declaration of Independence that was ushered in following statehood rights around the globe. To achieve this goal, his novel is a plea for the need for the abolition of such evil institutions as convents, in which helpless young women have their sanity systematically destroyed.
Denis Diderot’s novel THE NUN is a Penguin classics publication.
