The Nun (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  Given this context, what image of lesbianism does The Nun offer? One answer is provided by placing Diderot’s novel in a purely literary (and, in a sense, ahistorical) context: that of the libertine fiction discussed earlier. This is a novel written by a man for, at least explicitly, a male reader, namely the Marquis de Croismare, and so in part it aims to titillate and excite. (The fact, though, that novel-reading was seen primarily as an activity for women in eighteenth-century France might even suggest that Diderot’s novel is, in part at least, lesbian pornography for a female public.) Such a reading might be given added weight by bringing into play Diderot’s own apparently erotic fascination with lesbianism. Diderot wrote The Nun at the same time as he was reflecting on what he imagined to be the incestuous and lesbian relationship between his mistress Sophie Volland and her sister Mademoiselle Le Gendre. In a letter to Sophie of 3 August 1759, for example, Diderot views the relationship between the two sisters as entirely welcome, even (erotically?) appealing:

  We shall soon be together again, my dear, never fear, and these lips will once again touch the lips I love. Until then I forbid your mouth to everyone except your sister. It does not make me unhappy to be her successor, indeed it rather pleases me. It is as if I were pressing her soul between yours and mine.

  This reading of Diderot’s novel as an erotic text is certainly partial, but it has found favour with some, not least the Italian film-maker Joe d’Amato, whose crude pornographic ‘nunsploitation’ film Convent of Sinners (Monaca nel peccato, 1986) is, at least according to the credits, based on Diderot’s novel.

  Another approach to lesbianism in The Nun, and one more in keeping with the historical context sketched out above, is to argue that the novel presents lesbianism, quite unproblematically, as another of the monstrous psychic and physiological side effects of living an unnaturally cloistered life: the novel, according to this view, presents lesbianism on a par with madness and sadistic cruelty. The final Mother Superior is depicted as a shallow and unstable personality who preys on those for whom she is meant to be caring. The Nun could be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of female intimacy, particularly within a same-sex, cloistered environment. Here again we might detect an echo of Diderot’s own concerns, for he is not only titillated by the possibility of Sophie Volland’s relationship with her sister; he is also angry and jealous, as his letter to Sophie on 17 September 1760 reveals:

  I have grown so touchy and unreasonable and jealous; you say such nice things about her and are so impatient if anyone finds fault with her that ... I dare not finish my sentence! I am ashamed of my feelings, but cannot prevent them. Your mother says that your sister likes pretty women and it is certain that she is very affectionate towards you; then think of that nun she was so fond of, and the voluptuous and loving way she sometimes has of leaning over you, and her fingers so curiously intertwined with yours!

  Diderot, both in this correspondence and in The Nun, could be said to be struggling to come to terms with, even to control, female intimacy. And the fact that it is a Benedictine monk (presumably Dom Morel) who tries to rape Suzanne once she has escaped from the convent could be seen as further evidence of the novel’s condemnation of the sexually damaging effects of the cloistered life: if only Dom Morel had been able to enjoy normal relations with women in society, the novel seems to imply, he would not have tried to rape Suzanne.

  But an alternative approach is to say that the novel does not constitute an unambiguous attack on lesbianism, nor does it depict same-sex intimacy for the titillation of the male (or, for that matter, female) reader. Instead, the novel might be offering a positive, even liberal vision of same-sex desire. Sainte-Eutrope is a happy, even euphoric place, a haven of lesbian love. It is worth remembering that the third Mother Superior’s sexual climaxes are presented subtly and sympathetically: she suffers far more than the sadistic second Mother Superior, who is so cruel to Suzanne. And she goes mad, and domestic harmony is upset, only when the Church intervenes, in the shape of the (male) confessors, and tells Suzanne that intimacy between women is wrong. In this sense, the implicitly positive portrayal of lesbianism could be said to go hand in hand with the explicitly negative portrayal of institutional repression: the Church is criticized, not just for cooperating in forcing young women to become nuns, but also for suppressing their natural sexual instincts and driving them mad.

  This approach, viewing the novel as a criticism of the Church for its attitude to human sexuality, is supported by Diderot’s comments elsewhere on sexuality. In his Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 1772), for example, Diderot uses the device of a South Sea island paradise to play off moral and natural law against each other, reserving particular criticism for ascetic Christian moral teaching on human sexuality. It is in particular the Church that tries to suppress same-sex desire and portray it negatively, to achieve stability in a world which, according to Diderot, is fundamentally unstable. Desire is a response to beauty, whatever the sex, and it cannot be divided into homo- and hetero-sexuality. Anticipating much recent gender theory, Diderot the materialist presents human sexuality as polymorphous, free-floating, fluid. As the scientist Bordeu declares at the end of D’Alembert’s Dream, in which homosexuality, bestiality, and masturbation are all mentioned: ‘Everything that exists can be neither against nor outside nature.’ Homosexual desire is both a fact of nature and a fact of society. So, the attack in The Nun might be against the Church’s attitude to lesbianism, not against lesbianism itself.

  Such a reading also enables us to see The Nun, paradoxically perhaps, as one of Diderot’s most feminist works. In The Nun there seems to be a symbolic division between masculine law and feminine desire: reason, justice, and sobriety characterize the male characters in the novel, notably Séraphin, Manouri, Hébert, and Dom Morel; madness, intrigue, and cruelty, on the other hand, characterize the majority of the women. For her part, however, Suzanne, by launching her lawsuit at Longchamp, shows that woman can also escape her hysteria and fight against social injustice. Perhaps the ultimate sign of female self-definition and affirmation in this novel is the exclusion of men that is concomitant with the expression of lesbian desire. Crucially it is precisely this power-move that the young Benedictine who helps Suzanne to escape promptly tries to subvert by trying to rape her.

  Like the letters of Graffigny’s Peruvian princess, Suzanne’s memoir constitutes a struggle to find a voice through the written word, a fight to break the silence imposed upon her by Church and family. Suzanne becomes a bold mouthpiece, a symbol of enlightened resistance, a ‘trouble-maker’ as she calls herself (p. 34). Whereas Rousseau seems to be at pains to silence woman, particularly in book V of his controversial pedagogical novel Émile (1762), in which he extols the virtues for a young woman of a stay in a convent as a fitting preparation for her sedentary life as a breast-feeding mother, Diderot gives her a powerful voice. It is the prevailing presence of this voice that makes possible the different readings of the novel, in particular the ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding the portrayal of lesbianism. How we interpret the narrative voice is crucial.

  Artful Artlessness

  Suzanne’s narrative is presented, at least initially, as a true story. This is Diderot emulating Richardson. The genesis of The Nun coincides, as we saw earlier, with Diderot’s discovery of the Englishman’s novels, in particular the ingenious epistolary novel Pamela, and Clarissa, a novel about female entrapment. From Richardson Diderot seems to have derived the idea that a novel can produce a reality effect and have the same effect on the reader as reality itself: the novel as deception, hypnotic illusion, falsehood dressed up as truth. The novel could assert its validity as a genre by presenting itself as true and moral.

  Similar truth claims had, however, been made since at least the end of the seventeenth century. Dissatisfied with the implausibilities of earlier fiction, novelists from the turn of the century onwards sought to win greater popular and critical esteem for their efforts by claiming that what they were writing was not fiction, but fact. They attempted to pass off fictions as memoirs, histories, journals, eyewitness accounts. In other words, they turned from third-person narratives to first-person narratives. If a third-person narrative could never seriously claim to be real—how could a narrator plausibly know everything about his characters?—a first-person narrative, such as a memoir, was much more authentic, much more plausible, much less ‘literary’. Perhaps the best-known French first-person narratives from the eighteenth century before The Nun are Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731) and Marivaux’s unfinished Marianne’s Life (La Vie de Marianne, 1731—42).

  First-person narrators commonly do two things at the beginning of their narratives: they lay claim to honesty and naivety, and they deny any ulterior motive, such as a persuasive role. Suzanne is no exception. From the outset she stresses the confessional aspect of her memoir when she claims that she is ‘writing with neither skill nor artifice, but with the naivety of a young person of my age and with my own native honesty’ (p. 3). This insistence on her youth-fulness occurs on a number of occasions in the novel. She states that she was 16 when the question of her taking the veil was first raised (p. 4), but though her story must extend over at least nine years, she tells us towards the end that she is barely 20 (p. 109), and in the concluding ‘Preface’, Madame Madin claims that her ward is barely 17 (p. 162). One effect of these apparent inconsistencies, of course, is to stress the innocence of youth. But her claim to naivety and artlessness is, in fact, an artful way of luring her reader in—both her intended reader (the Marquis de Croismare) and us. For what distinguishes The Nun from, say, Manon Lescaut is that in Diderot’s novel the perspective is explicitly feminine, and the intended reader is explicitly male.

  Suzanne’s memoir is presented as an honest, revelatory self-portrait, but at the same time she is eager to captivate, if not to seduce, the Marquis, to move him so powerfully that he will be persuaded to come to her aid. Partly, like Jacques the Fatalist, this is a story about storytelling: Suzanne is telling her story to the Marquis, which becomes a kind of framing narrative, within which we hear her telling her story to a number of other listeners. Our attention is focused throughout on the character of Suzanne. She is a strong and individualized presence from the start. We see everything from her perspective: Diderot the cross-dressing ventriloquist speaks with a woman’s voice. This distinctive perspective, crucially, is lost in the film version by Rivette, who abandons the subjectivity of the first-person narrative in favour of a more objective approach.

  The novel is, ultimately, an exercise in rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Suzanne’s narrative encourages us to share in her sufferings, to feel sorry for her, and to be persuaded by the case she is making. Despite her claims to naivety and innocence, she nevertheless demonstrates at least some self-awareness. The night before she is due to take her vows, for example, she writes self-consciously: ‘I played out in my mind the role I would perform, kneeling before the altars, a young girl crying out in protest against an event to which she seems to have given her consent’ (p. 12). When she is summoned before the Archdeacon, she acknowledges her advantages, physical and otherwise, including, crucially, the ability to make people believe her: ‘I have a touching appearance; the intense pain I had experienced had altered it but had not robbed it of any of its character. The sound of my voice also touches people, and they feel that when I speak, I am telling the truth’ (p. 67). And she directs Manouri to leave out certain details of her past when presenting her case because ‘they would have made me look odious and would not have helped my case’ (p. 24).

  Suzanne is clearly alive to the art of self-presentation. Moreover, her sense of an audience is not limited to her convents. At one point she seems to envisage a wider readership beyond the Marquis when she refers to ‘most of those who will read these memoirs’ (p. 71) and even anticipates their reactions. (This might also explain why the novel opens with a reference to the Marquis in the third person: the first paragraph reads like an introduction addressed, not to the Marquis himself, but to a wider reading public.) At the end of her account Suzanne goes so far as to recognize an element of deception: ‘I have realized that, though it was utterly unintentional, I had in each line shown myself to be as unhappy as I really was, but also much nicer than I really am. Could it be that we believe men to be less sensitive to the depiction of our suffering than to the image of our charms, and do we hope that it is much easier to seduce them than it is to touch their hearts?’ (p. 152). The effect has been, not one of spontaneity and naivety, but one of studied control and seduction through the many devices of a first-person narrative. Suzanne is a deft narrator presenting the Marquis and us with the image of an inexperienced young girl. So what are these devices and how do they work? How persuasive is Suzanne?

  Suzanne displays great narrative and descriptive skills, despite her claim to be writing in an artless way, and she uses these skills to offer the most positive image of herself possible. One of the most striking is her ability to deploy direct speech. She shows other people responding favourably to her in order to encourage the reader to react to her in the same way. At the end of the vow-taking ceremony, for example, she reports the words of her fellow nuns: ‘“But look, Sister, look how pretty she is! Look how her black veil brings out the whiteness of her complexion! How her headband suits her! How it rounds off her face! How it makes her cheeks stand out! How her habit shows off her waist and her arms!...”’ (p. 7). Conversely, she reproduces her exchange with her mother in order to provoke revulsion in the reader for the mother’s cruel, twisted logic: ‘“don’t make your dying mother suffer; let her go to her grave in peace so that she may tell herself, as she’s about to appear before the judge of all things, that she has atoned for her sin as far as she could, so that she can reassure herself that, after she is dead, you won’t make trouble for her family and you won’t lay claim to rights that aren’t yours”’ (p. 21). The technique is a clever one: offering accounts of how others see her means that Suzanne does not have to rely on putting forward her own views; the text works for her to create an illusion of innocence.

  But if Suzanne appears to be good at remembering dialogue, she is also good at forgetting it. Just as she dwells on conversations which cast her in a favourable light, so too she is adept at avoiding scenes and passing over exchanges which might show her in an unfavourable light. Her account of her first vow-taking is surprisingly brief and undramatic: ‘They did whatever they wanted with me throughout the morning, which has never been real to me, as I never knew how long it lasted. I have no idea what I did or what I said. I must have been asked questions, and I must have replied and made my vows, but I have no memory of doing so. I found I had become a nun just as innocently as I had been made a Christian’ (p. 29). Suzanne is at pains to stress that, although she went through the ceremony of final vow-taking at Longchamp, she did so like an automaton: her heart and mind were not engaged in what she was doing. (In Rivette’s film, there is no scene depicting vow-taking at Longchamp, which is perhaps the definitive negative means of conveying Suzanne’s point that she remembered nothing of that morning.) This is important: she has to counter the potential objection from the Marquis that she knew exactly what she was doing and that she had chosen not to resist, as she had done at the convent Sainte-Marie. Her references to unconscious behaviour and amnesia are part of her arsenal of narrative devices.

  Suzanne’s overwhelming reliance on dialogue suggests an important link between The Nun and Diderot’s contemporary experimentation in the theatre. This is a theatrical novel in the broadest sense, a novel full of detailed, lively, well-paced dialogues. But more specific links can be detected between the novel and Diderot’s drames. In his plays Diderot was interested in showing how a character’s ‘conditions’, by which he meant, for instance, their profession or family role, had a large share in determining what they are and what they can do. Likewise in The Nun, Diderot shows how the condition of the reluctant nun carries with it pain and suffering, a necessary consequence of violating what Diderot sees as the essential human need for sociability. In both his plays and in this novel, Diderot the materialist seems to have been less interested in individual characters than in showing how people are shaped and determined by their environment and their circumstances.

  Diderot’s conception of the drame also laid significant emphasis on the emotional involvement of the audience. Diderot aimed to offer moving and morally uplifting representations of the lives of ordinary people as a stimulus to intellectual reflection on the problems of humanity. The Nun, like Diderot’s ideal theatre, relies on emotional impact for its intellectual stimulus. This is a highly sentimental novel which stirs the reader’s emotions. It is a forerunner of the Gothic novel with its depictions of hideous suffering. Suzanne recounts scenes which present her as an innocent victim, even a Christ-like victim, embarking, it would seem, on her own march to Calvary, before being resurrected from her cell on the third day (pp. 41–2). It is precisely this Christ-like aspect of Suzanne’s character, the innocent victim at her most sinned against, that is highlighted at the end of Rivette’s film: in a departure from Diderot’s text, Rivette makes Suzanne throw herself from an upper-storey window of the brothel, and she is last seen from above lying dead on the pavement, spread out like a penitent before the altar, but also like Christ on the cross.

  Rivette is arguably more faithful to Diderot’s novel in his theatrically stylized use of space and positioning of characters, evoking at every turn Suzanne’s entrapment and suffering. (Rivette’s film version is in fact a cinematographic adaptation of a dramatized version of the novel by Jean Gruault, first staged in 1960 and revived by Rivette in 1963.) For the art of The Nun has close links with another aspect of Diderot’s theatrical experimentation in the 1750s: the tableau. Diderot’s innovative preoccupation in the theatre with creating an overall stage picture, with a great deal of attention paid to décor, costumes, and the positioning of actors, extended to The Nun. This is a theatrical novel with lots of physical portraits and descriptions of gestures and movements, similar to the extensive stage directions in Diderot’s plays. Suzanne excels at painting visually striking ensembles and group scenes, such as the death of Madame de Moni (p. 31), where static description and the use of light and dark create a truly ‘mournful scene’, a theatrical mise en scène with a specific shape, and which appeals strongly to the reader’s emotions.