Novel: The Nun

Overview
Denis Diderot’s The Nun (La Religieuse), written in the early 1760s but first published in 1796, is a first-person narrative presented as the memoir of Suzanne Simonin, a young bourgeois woman forced into convent life against her will. Both a gripping psychological story and a pointed Enlightenment critique of monastic institutions, the novel exposes how vows made under coercion corrupt conscience, how power is enforced through secrecy and ritual, and how spiritual language can mask worldly interests and desires. Framed as a plea addressed to a benefactor, Suzanne’s voice is lucid, observant, and stubbornly rational, even as she is subjected to isolation, manipulation, and abuse.

Plot
Suzanne is the third daughter in a respectable Parisian family. When her parents abruptly insist she take the veil, she resists, insisting she has no vocation. The pressure is relentless, family reputation, financial calculation, and clerical rhetoric converge until, during a harrowing ceremony, she is maneuvered into pronouncing vows she does not believe. She later discovers the hidden motive: she is the child of her mother’s adultery, and the convent is a convenient solution to the scandal and the expense of a dowry.

At her first convent, the mother superior is pious and gentle, hoping persuasion will nurture a genuine calling. After this superior’s death, leadership passes to a zealot who interprets Suzanne’s sincerity as rebellion. The regime turns punitive: silence, surveillance, public humiliations, solitary confinement, and the suggestion of diabolical possession to justify exorcisms and further discipline. Suzanne turns to the courts, arguing that vows made under duress lack moral and legal force. Her deposition is precise and courageous, but the case fails, and she is returned to monastic custody stigmatized as a scandal-maker.

Transferred to a second convent, Suzanne encounters a contrasting danger. The superior, cultivated and capricious, grows erotically fixated on the young nun. The atmosphere becomes suffocatingly intimate: embraces, nocturnal visits, and declarations of spiritual love that cross into physical hunger. Suzanne, horrified and compassionate in equal measure, resists without exposing her persecutor to public shame. When this superior’s health collapses, a harsher administration takes over and the punishments resume.

A cleric arranges an escape, revealing yet another form of exploitation: rescue offered with a price. Once outside, Suzanne experiences the precarious freedoms of the city, dependence on dubious patrons, the risk of sexual predation, the threat of poverty. The manuscript breaks off with her fate unresolved, her appeal for protection still hanging, her insistence on a life guided by conscience intact.

Themes
The Nun dissects coercion: familial, legal, and spiritual pressures that convert obedience into a social technology. Diderot contrasts two modes of abuse, ascetic cruelty that weaponizes sin and grace, and sentimental tyranny that disguises desire as devotion. The novel also probes the fault line between law and ethics. Suzanne’s legal argument against forced vows is lucid, but procedure bows to reputation and ecclesiastical influence. Her voice, clear, empirical, finely attentive to gesture and space, anchors a meditation on freedom as the capacity to refuse a role scripted by others. Sexuality, power, and surveillance interlock: the convent’s architecture of grilles, cells, and confessional screens channels appetite and punishes dissent.

Form and provenance
Conceived as an elaborate literary hoax to entice a sympathetic nobleman back to Paris, the narrative drew on real cases of nuns seeking release from vows. Its posthumous publication sharpened its impact in a France newly alert to institutional hypocrisy. The Nun endures as both intimate portrait and institutional anatomy, a study of how a truthful voice survives within systems designed to make truth unsayable.