I find myself struggling to remember novels in which priests, monks, and nuns appear in a decent light. This isn't one of them.
Denis Diderot's “The Nun”, published posthumously in 1792, is the story of a young woman named Suzanne who is forced into the religious life by her parents. The reason given for this is that she has two sisters, both married, who need the money that would have gone to Suzanne for their families. I think you will not be surprised to learn that there's more to it than that; this book's author was, after all, one of the leading thinkers of what eventually became the French Revolution, and the novel appeared a mere 29 years before that event began. And everybody knows that the Revolution had little use for the clergy.
Unsurprisingly, we later learn that the man who raised her is not her father. Her mother had an affair years before that the man who raised her apparently doesn't know about, and her mother has been regretting this sin ever since. We don't learn who Suzanne's biological father is, but we do learn that part of her mother's atonement involves ignoring Suzanne as much as possible and sending her to the convent as soon as she might.
There's some detail here about how it is that Suzanne is forced into taking vows, but most of the story focuses on what she and various allies do to try to get her vows withdrawn, what happens to her in the convent while that's going on (it's about as abusive as you might think), and at least a part of what her eventual fate includes. I won't bother to reveal that last, partly because giving away the end of a story is a tremendous sin, but mostly because, to our surprise, the details of Suzanne's fate are far less mportant to the story than the operations of the convents and of the Church as a whole.
And of course, as we said before, the operations of the convents and of the Church as a whole are without a single redeeming characteristic here. Not one. Suzanne sometimes finds kind people; those people are either outside of the Church authority, outside of the Church altogether, or in disobedience to her Mother Superior. As for the Mother Superior herself – well, Suzanne has two main ones over the course of the story. Her first is good to her, but that one dies pretty quickly of old age. The succeeding Mother Superior restores some convent practices that her preceding Mother took away, such as making the nuns whip themselves or wear hair shirts to repent for things that that Mother considers sinful. Another Mother Superior, in the convent that Suzanne moves to next, is an obvious lesbian who falls in love with Suzanne. (Today, of course, a lot of us wouldn't consider that a sin, but it was in the 18th Century, and in any case the difficulty Suzanne has with a lesbian Mother Superior is not so much with the sexuality as with the hypocrisy of a Mother Superior who is supposed to be protecting Suzanne's celibacy and innocence.)
So “The Nun” is less a novel, although it certainly is that, and more a critique of the Church's role in French society at the time. The fact that it's based on the true-life case of Marguerite Delamarre therefore doesn't hurt a bit. In 1758, Delamarre tried to be released from her vows as a nun, but lost her case. Diderot learned that a friend of his, the Marquis de Croismare, had interested himself in Delamarre's case, and wrote a series of letters from the fictional Suzanne to the Marquis as a kind of practical joke, to persuade the Marquis to move to Paris to help Suzanne. I've been unable to determine whether or not this joke worked – I rather hope it didn't. If I were the Marquis and got a set of impassioned letters begging me for my help in a case like one I had previously tried to assist in, and if I then moved back to Paris and discovered the whole thing was a fake, goodness knows what I'd do. It doesn't matter a whole lot anyway, because whatever happened with Diderot's little joke, it eventually gave us this novel.
All things considered, “The Nun” is a better argument against Church corruption than it is a novel, but it's a pretty good novel too.
Benshlomo says, Fiction has all kinds of uses.
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