Book Review: The Nun

"The Marquis de Croismare's reply, if he does reply, will serve as the opening lines of this tale."

With these first words, the tale of Suzanne Simonin, a young woman barely in her twenties, who wishes to leave a Paris convent. She describes to the Marquis through her various letters how she came to live in a nunnery thanks to her mother's attempts to hide her daughter's illegitimacy, how she feels little vocation for life as a nun, and worst of all, how the tortures and horrors she endured at the hands of a ruthless and egotistic Mother Superior served to strengthen her resolve to flee.

Author Denis Diderot based this series of letters on an actual incident of 1758 that piqued the interest of his friend the Marquis de Croismare. Though the events in his novel are fictitious, they do paint a damning picture of church practices at the time. At the convent of Longchamp, Suzanne suffers because of her desire to leave: forced to wear a hair-shirt, given little to no food for days, all items stolen from her cell, the lock broken and non-repaired, other sisters entering her cell at all hours to keep her from sleeping so she would hopefully miss a prayer session thus deserving more ridicule and harsher penalties. When Suzanne is removed from Longchamp to another nunnery at Arpajon, she finds herself subjected to another (possible) side of convent life. The Reverend Mother takes a liking to Suzanne, turning her affections away from one of the other Sisters, and unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Suzanne.

For the most part, I empathized with Suzanne, all the trials she endured at Longchamp filling me with disgust at the Sisters' inhumanity. But the empathy began to lessen when she reached Arpajon. Diderot makes Suzanne play dumb to the advances of the Reverend Mother, but not once does he have her attempt to put a stop to it until her confessor from a nearby monastery describes how wicked such tastes are and the would go mad and foam at the mouth (which happens to the Reverend Mother). Only then does she put her foot down and avoid the Reverend Mother, treating her a mixture of pity and disgust. She could have stopped the seduction from escalating, but to me seemed very complicit with events, even to the point of encouraging them at times. It seemed to go against the strong character developed at Longchamp, when Suzanne withstood all the torments and harassment with grace and dignity.

Perhaps I'm more disappointed with Diderot's view on homosexuality as a psychological problem rather than with Suzanne's response to it, and I'm still trying to reconcile my modern day ideas with those of the 18th century.

Image from LibraryThing.