The Rather Abstract Charm of Diderot’s La Réligieuse

 

     Diderot’s La Réligieuse is scarcely a novel at all.  Apart from the apparent accident of its composition and an elaborate metafictional apparatus, the book focuses less on action and events or on constructing credible characters than on the insistent repetition of the central figure’s suffering.  The image of Suzanne as a “damsel in distress” [1] is, in fact, the center of the story’s content.  Virtually every page is filled with her helpless laments and the whole work is presented as her appeal for a rescuer. 

     In this use of the image of a helpless woman, in need of a man’s intervention, Diderot was highly conventional, though he was innovative, even radical, in other ways.  The spectacle of a defenseless woman, threatened, often sexually, by a villain occurs universally.  The motif, one of the most widespread in world culture, appears in myths like those of Andromeda and Sita and in many heroines of the Yuan drama, through Scheherazade and European fairy tales such as “Snow White” and “Rapunzel,” to nineteenth century American melodrama, modern Bollywood movies, and bdsm pornography.

     In the last paragraph of her story, Suzanne summarizes her entire manuscript saying “je m'étais montrée à chaque ligne aussi malheureuse à la vérité que je l'étais (“I had shown myself in every line as unhappy as I was”).  Given such a simple and unchanging protagonist, Diderot might have concentrated on description (of which there is very little) or style (generally straightforward) or on theme.

     Diderot’s view of the Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, of Christianity might suggest that last alternative.  The fact is that prior to fictional treatments of the topic of convent life often had very little to do with the spiritual growth for which religious houses were created.  A good deal of the genre is rather overheated.  Often the nunnery was represented as an impediment to lovers, as in the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, or the Lettres portugaises of the Vicomte de Guilleragues.  Risqué tales also proliferated concerning this female world forbidden to men’s eyes, including Vénus dans le cloître, attributed to Jean Barrin and Le Portier des Chartreux attributed to Gervais de La Touche. 

     In La Réligieuse Diderot does not attack the church as a whole despite his hostility to Roman Catholicism.  Suzanne is a devoted believer who has no specific objection to the prayers and rituals she is expected to perform.  Her only protest, and presumably her author’s, is against the forced imposition of religious vows.  The depictions of one viciously sadistic Mother Superior and another, consumed by predatory homosexual desire (and unstable to boot) are balanced by the first, a generous-hearted mystic who seems really to belong in a convent.    

     Forced vocations were a reality; indeed, Diderot’s sister had died at twenty-eight in an Ursuline convent in which she had been placed due to her mental health, and the author had himself been confined in a Carmelite monastery at the age of thirty at the orders of his own father who wished to prevent his son’s marriage to Anne-Antoinette Champion.  The cloister walls held him scarcely a month, but the experience may well have provided him with memories that sharpen his account of Suzanne’s suffering. 

     However, neither that slender theme and nor the generous helpings of pathos, highly seasoned as it is with sex and violence, provides the book’s principal interest.  In recent years the text has gained increasing recognition for its conceptual and metafictional elements, what might be called a sort of proto-postmodernism (if the term is not too barbarous). [2]

     Even a simplified outline of the levels of fabulation in La Réligieuse can be dizzying.  The events of the plot are discernible only through multiple layers of refraction, distortion, irony, and deceit.  The text is presented, as were many early novels, as factual, a genuine series of letters, documents of lived experience, though from the start the fact of their publication throws that appearance in doubt.  Still, the narrator is, as she often reminds the reader, a perfect ingenue who says she writes “sans talent et sans art, avec la naïveté d'un enfant de mon âge et la franchise de mon caractère” (“without talent and without art, with the naivety of a girl of my age and with the frankness of my character”).  Her unworldliness is only perhaps too perfect, as she strains credulity when she cannot recognize lesbian love-making though it seems that both she and the Mother Superior reach orgasm.  

     Furthermore, this modesty topos is a highly conventional formula, recognized for millennia by rhetoricians.  Since Suzanne’s pleas are meant to be persuasive, to move the heart of her correspondent, and win his aid, they are appropriately rhetorical, though the use of such familiar devices may cast a wash of uncertainty over the story’s veracity. 

     The tension between reality and representation that inevitably accompanies fiction is, in the case of La Réligieuse, dramatically heightened by the peculiar circumstances of the book’s creation.  Suzanne’s heart-felt appeals are directed to the Marquis de Croisemare, a real person and a friend of Diderot’s.  Thus the “novel” breaks out of the page and into lived experience.  The letters were originally composed as part of an elaborate hoax to bring the Marquis to Paris, since he had several years before sought to intervene in the case of a certain Marguerite Delamarre who had been involuntarily confined in a convent.  The plan failed -- though the Marquis was taken in and responded with sympathy and offers of help, he asked his correspondent to his estate instead of coming to Paris. 

     Diderot continued to work on the letters over the next ten years.  In 1770 Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, included the book in his handwritten journal Correspondance littéraire, a periodical of tiny but influential circulation, along with the Marquis’ actual replies.  Diderot continued to work on the manuscript, modifying it as well as adding a “Préface-annexe” explaining the circumstances of its composition and altering some passages by Grimm and the Marquis.  (This “preface” was printed at the end of the text, a detail that puts the reader just a bit more off balance.)

     Finally, in 1796 the book was published in a generally available edition which proved so popular that it ran through fourteen printings by the turn of the nineteenth century.  By this time the Revolution had first outlawed lifelong religious vows and then attempted to suppress the church altogether.  La Réligieuse was associated in this revolutionary period not only with unorthodox religious views, but also with pioneering avant-garde artistic technique.  Diderot’s interest in interrogating the ideal of mimesis is evident in the very title of his story “Ceci n’est pas un conte” (“This is not a Story”).

     The book’s most radical characteristics points toward such new directions as performance art, metafiction, and collaborative composition.  The circumstances of its creation and its resulting form question the very bases of mimetic fiction, rendering the subject unstable and ambiguous and in that way La Réligieuse anticipates late twentieth-century trends at a time when much of European culture had not even yet engaged with realism. 

 

 

 

1.  The phrase is in fact used by Richardson in The History of Sir Charles Grandison but such threatened and oppressed women regularly appear in his other novels as well, as well as in the Gothic novels of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

2.  Consideration of Diderot, often centering on Jacques le fataliste et son maître or on “Ceci n’est pas un conte” occurs regularly in discussions of metafiction.  See, for example, Gamal Abdel-Fattah, Postmodern Literature and its Background, Marie-Laure Ryan, “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality,” Narrative, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1997), Malin Strømberg, What Makes Fiction “Meta”? A comparative study of literary self-reflexivity from Sterne to Winterson, and Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox.  Diderot’s metafictional role is also reflected in his appearance in Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage.