The Nun

Satire and Sexuality

Diderot was no stranger to satirizing convents. Early in the Philosophical Thoughts (Pensées philosophiques, 1746), he compares convents to prisons, and in the Sceptic’s Walk (La Promenade du sceptique), written in 1747 but not published until 1830, he develops this witty defamiliarization by comparing nuns to birds and convents to aviaries:

All over the place one finds big aviaries in which female birds are locked up. Here there are pious parakeets, bleating out words of affection or singing a jargon that they do not understand; over there are little turtledoves sighing and lamenting the loss of their freedom; elsewhere there are linnets fluttering about and deafening themselves with their chatter, and the guides have fun whistling at them through the bars of their cages. . . . What torments these captives is that they can hear travellers going past but are unable to go after them and mingle with them. Nevertheless, their cages are spacious, clean and well supplied with millet and sweets.

Madame de Graffigny similarly ‘makes strange’ the commonplace convent in her best-selling novel Letters from a Peruvian Princess (Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 1747), in which the naive Peruvian letter-writer comments abrasively on her experiences in Paris, including temporary incarceration in a convent, which she refers to as ‘a house of virgins’: ‘The virgins who live there are so profoundly ignorant . . . The faith they swear to their country’s god demands that they give up all advantages, intellectual endeavour, feelings and even, I think, reason, at least that is the impression they give by what they say.’

The apparent echo of Graffigny’s cross-cultural fiction is important. For in The Nun Diderot uses a device familiar from numerous eighteenth-century satirical fictions, from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lettres persanes, 1721) via Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Princess to Voltaire’s Candide (1759): the device of the naive observer. Suzanne is, literally, a novice, an outsider who brings an apparently honest and disarmingly satirical perspective to bear on the dark recesses of convent life (though the extent of her honesty and innocence is crucially open to question). The satire in The Nun gains its incisive force from the distinctive narrative form of the novel. We see everything through the eyes of Suzanne, the suffering victim of family pressure to become a nun with no vocation. Although some of the satire comes from voices other than Suzanne’s, notably Manouri and Dom Morel, even these voices are filtered through Suzanne’s all-controlling voice. This serves to make The Nun the most sustained, most graphic, and most far-reaching literary satire of enforced seclusion in the eighteenth century.

In a letter to Meister on 27 September 1780 about The Nun, Diderot writes in self-congratulatory mode: ‘I do not think a more terrifying satire of convents has ever been written.’ His observation is important, though, as it serves to underline a crucial point about this novel: this is not a satire of the Christian religion per se, nor is it a satire of the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, which may be why it was never put on the Index. But the satire is perhaps more specific than Diderot implies. The Nun is an attack on enforced vocations, an attack on the unjust collaboration of Church, state, and family, an attack on the convent as a silencing mechanism and a means of social control. This is an anti-cloistral satire that argues for human rights and self-determination. Diderot denounces the persecution and repression of the individual who enters the religious life against his or her own will. There are examples of true devotion in the novel, and Diderot treats them uncritically. Suzanne’s own faith, crucially, is in a sense unimpeachable: it is precisely at the height of her suffering at Longchamp that she feels that ‘Christianity was superior to all the other religions in the world’ (p. 65). His real target is the practice of enforced vocations; the real issue at stake is individual freedom. What Diderot exposes, at least implicitly, are the deleterious effects of all kinds of systems on the human beings ensnared by them. The ramifications of the novel’s satire are very broad.

But if Diderot fixes his satirical gaze on enforced seclusion for what might be called political reasons, he does so for physiological reasons too. As a materialist, Diderot is interested in how human beings operate in physical terms. For him, the convent becomes a laboratory, the nuns experimental subjects: just as he uses the hypothesis of blindness in order to think about vision in the Letter on the Blind, so in The Nun he uses the hypothesis of seclusion from society in order to think about society itself. What happens, he asks, when you place people in (to him) abnormal, unnatural conditions? The concepts of nature and sociability are crucial here. Diderot is fascinated by the alienation of the natural being. For him, the natural being is a social animal. The novel describes in graphic, even startling, detail the alienating effects of the anti-social, cloistered life. Enforced seclusion violates what Diderot sees as the essential human need for sociability. The novel dramatizes the problematic relationship between the individual and society.

Diderot was not the first to dwell on this problematic relationship. Significantly, The Nun can be read as a response to the ideas of the proud and persecuted citizen of Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another of the great philosophes in the eighteenth century. Rousseau had profound disagreements with his fellow philosophes, notably Voltaire and Diderot. What he rejected in particular was their belief in cultural and scientific progress. For him, humanity was free by nature but enslaved by civilization. In 1755 he published his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité), a far-reaching critique of the corrupting in…