The Nun

Playing with Truth

But Suzanne is not just the talented painter in this text; she is also the subject of the portrait, an actor in her own drama. This raises the important question of how much Suzanne actually knows about herself and about others. The novel, because of the narrative perspective it adopts, makes this question infuriatingly difficult to answer. For, as we have seen, on the one hand there is the rhetoric of the naive, innocent Suzanne, and on the other hand there is clear textual evidence of a much more knowing persona. Suzanne is both ingenuous and well informed, a character in whom there is an unsettling and paradoxical combination of apparent naivety and satirical insight. As in Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions (1764–70), the first-person narrative form becomes a vehicle for exploring the self in all its complexity.

The complexity surrounding Suzanne is created in the first instance by the confusion surrounding the timing of the narrative. When is Suzanne actually writing? Suzanne’s perspective on her life is complex and confusing. We need only look at the opening paragraph of the memoir to be confused. Is this a beginning or an ending? Suzanne implies that she is just starting to write her memoirs (‘it is for this reason that I have resolved to put aside my pride and my diffidence and write these memoirs’, p. 3), but then she promptly refers to how they end, which implies she has already written them. The first paragraph reads almost like a text that has been added after the completion of the rest of the narrative. What is clear is that Diderot deliberately does not present a narrator who recounts her story from a position of distance and superior knowledge. Rather we have a sense of a narrative being written at a very short remove from the events being narrated. Diderot closes down the distance between the time of the events and the time of the narration, a distance that earlier novelists, like Prévost and Marivaux, had expanded for deliberate effect.

The uncertainty that this creates permeates the text. Ignorance and awareness coexist in a delicate tension. At times Suzanne does seem to be able to step back and offer critical comments on her experiences, such as when she declares: ‘Oh! Monsieur, you simply cannot begin to imagine how devious these Mothers Superior are!’ (p. 5). But more often than not, Suzanne claims to be ignorant. For example, when subjected to persecution at Longchamp, Suzanne protests ignorance then and now of the reasons for this treatment:

To be frank, I am not a man and I do not know what can be imagined about one woman and another, and still less about a woman on her own. But since my bed had no curtains and since nuns came into my room at all hours of the day and night, what can I say, Monsieur? Despite their outward reserve, their modest looks and their chaste expression, these women must have truly corrupt hearts. Or at least they know that unseemly acts can be committed on one’s own, whereas I do not. So I have never really understood what they were accusing me of, and they spoke in such an obscure way that I had no idea how to respond. (pp. 59–60)

Already these protestations of ignorance relate to the question of sexual knowledge, an issue that will come to the fore when Suzanne is describing her stay in the convent of Sainte-Eutrope.

The question of Suzanne’s knowingness is particularly important when considering the image of lesbianism that the novel offers. At the heart of the novel is the thorny problem of sexual self-knowledge, one reason why the text still fascinates readers today. Suzanne would have the Marquis—and us—believe that she understands nothing at all about lesbian sexuality. But how much does she really know? The signs are there from the start of her time at Sainte-Eutrope:

On the first evening, the Mother Superior came to visit me; she came in as I was getting undressed. It was she who took off my veil and wimple and brushed my hair for bed; it was she who undressed me. She said a hundred sweet things to me and stroked me a thousand times, which made me feel rather awkward, but I do not know why, because I did not know what was happening, and neither did she, and even now as I think back over it, what could we have possibly known? (pp. 95–6)

Suzanne insists on her ignorance then and now of what was happening: she pretends not to know what the Mother Superior’s advances mean even as she recounts them. But at the moment of writing, she has already learnt that the Mother Superior is a lesbian, so her failure—or refusal—to make the point explicit is revealing.

Diderot’s achievement in The Nun is to construct a naive or ‘innocent’ female narrator who can none the less narrate her own and others’ sexual experiences, an achievement that recalls John Cleland’s narrative technique in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), which was first translated into French in 1751, and which depicts the erotic activity between Fanny Hill, the 15-year-old heroine, and Phoebe Ayres, her much older instructor, who initiates her into lesbian sex. But unlike Fanny, who brings retrospective knowledge to bear and explicitly acknowledges that Phoebe was not just a harmless companion, Suzanne describes what the reader can perceive to be lesbian sexual encounters, while leaving her understanding of what was actually going on enticingly and crucially ambiguous. This is the case in her delicately euphemistic account of the Mother Superior’s orgasm:

Eventually there came a point, and I do not know if this was out of pleasure or pain, when she went deathly pale, her eyes shut, her whole body tensed violently, her lips tightened at first, slightly moistened as if by some kind of foam, then her mouth opened and she gave a deep sigh, as if she was dying. I jumped up, I thought she was unwell, I was going to leave and call for help. (p. 106)

But the way the narrative continues, and in particular the words Suzanne uses to describe her…