by Steven Moore
And since Voltaire valued brevity, I’ll stop there.
The only other French novelist of the time as daring and innovative as Voltaire was his fellow Encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713–84).172 Like Voltaire, he originally disdained the novel, defining it as “a tissue of frivolous and imaginary events the perusal of which was dangerous to both taste and morals.”173 But also like Voltaire, he realized the novel was a personal space where he could express more of himself and pursue his ideas with greater freedom than in his public, nonfiction work. In 1748, the same year Voltaire made his fiction debut, Diderot published anonymously an extraordinary novel entitled The Indiscreet Jewels (Les Bijoux indiscrets). Reportedly undertaken as a dare from his mistress to write something along the lines of Crébillon’s Sofa, its premise sounds juvenile (and the reason why literary critics ignored the novel until recently): a genie gives the bored king of the Congo a magic ring that conjures a woman’s “jewel” (vulva) to speak up and reveal the lowdown about its hostess, for “a jewel is dispassionate, and adds nothing to the truth.”174 The king’s mistress begs him not to let the cat out of the bag: “You will spread discord in every household, undeceive every husband, drive every lover to despair, ruin wives, dishonor maidens, and cause countless other disturbances,” but he doesn’t care. “Resolve to familiarize yourself with these new tellers of tales” (6). What these conteuses tell are mostly bawdy tales of sexual encounters, confirming the timeless male fear/fantasy that women are sexually insatiable. These vagina monologues expose women as dishonest hypocrites who are considerably more sexually experienced than they let on to be. Pointing his ring at one woman after another, sometimes at groups, the shocked king almost gives up on his folkloric quest to uncover a faithful woman; the only one who is as honest as she pretends to be is his mistress, to his relief. (Just two other “jewels” are silent when the magic ring is turned upon them: a lesbian, and a woman who limits herself to anal sex.) Men don’t come off much better: the chatterboxes expose them as liars about their sexual conquests, as cuckolds and fools who ruin themselves in pursuit of “jewelry,” and count priests and spiritual directors among their most frequent visitors.
What sounds like a smutty joke at women’s expense also sounds like a critique of the silence imposed on women in a patriarchal society, a stifling of their impulse to speak truth to power, and of the fear men have of what women really think of them. The women liberated by the ring don’t speak their mind so much as their body, a revolt against the male tendency to deny or repress female sexuality, but also an exposé of female complicity with that wish. They don’t dare boast of their sexual exploits as men do, and don’t want to: once they hear other women’s jewels yapping, they buy muzzles to silence their own. They censor themselves as a matter of habit, instilled in them from girlhood by a patriarchal society that doesn’t want to hear what they think, and that would ostracize them if they spoke frankly. After the first jewel speaks, “all the ladies paled, looked at each other without a word, and preserved their gravity . . . lest the conversation should get out of control” (6), and thereafter they adopt “an air of constraint and spoke only in monosyllables” (7), not daring to disturb the patriarchal order. (The bejeweled reader will have noticed how few female novelists I’ve discussed since their heyday in the 17th century.) Some say “that jewels have always spoken, but so softly that what they said was at times barely audible, even to those to whom they belonged” (10). Other women are in denial, unwilling to admit they are sexual beings, ashamed of their bodies, “Always in dread of hearing an impertinent voice issuing from below” (11). But Diderot was also aware that women weren’t allowed to be honest: shortly after he begins using the ring, the king asks his mistress Mirzoza, “when a woman’s mouth and her jewel contradict each other, which should be believed?” and then explains why he trusts the jewel more than its spokeswoman:
“what interest could these have in disguising the truth? Their motive could only be an illusion of honor. But a jewel has no illusions; it is surely not the seat of prejudice.”
“Illusions of honor!” exclaimed Mirzoza. “Prejudices! If Your Highness were exposed to the same inconveniences as we, he would understand that whatever relates to matters of virtue is far from illusory.” (8)
Women of the bourgeois and upper classes were trapped in a social system where “honor” (virtue/reputation) was the major quality that determined what kind of life they would have. As tedious as it may be for the modern reader to listen to their endless protests about preserving honor and reputation, women lived in a conservative society where to lose those badges of distinction—as illusory as they may be—was to lose everything. Women didn’t make those rules, but they had to follow them, and the note of exasperation in Mirzoza’s response is sobering. After a while the king stops referring to his female subjects as “women” and just calls them “jewels”—women had to put up with that too. Diderot also notes how women, denied the more open expression of sexuality that men enjoy, sublimate their erotic energy into cards or pets, not the last time he anticipates Freud.
Diderot was no feminist,175 and in this novel he mocks the two-facedness of women more often than he condemns their subjugation, but there’s just enough of the latter to justify Aram Vartanian’s bold claim that
The voice of his “jewels” functions, provocatively and subversively, as a general metaphor for the voice of “enlightenment” itself. In the novel, the sexuality of women, repressed since time immemorial by the hypocrisies, controls, and orthodoxies of every kind—religious, moral, social, esthetic, and political—joins forces with the new philosophical spirit of the age to break the silence imposed by tradition and custom, and, by so doing, to challenge established authority, awaken dulled curiosity, transgress the boundaries of consecrated prejudice, and gratify sexual desire in the spheres of cultural no less than sexual experience.176
In the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment, the king is conducting experiments to verify a thesis, not to humiliate women, and it’s important to note that Diderot doesn’t condemn female sexual activity as such, only lying about it, or beating around the bush about “love” when sex is meant. After the sexual secrets of two women are revealed, the author leaves us with no doubt which response he prefers: “Zelida was inconsolable. This woman, more deserving of pity than blame, developed an aversion for her Brahmin [priest], left her husband, shut herself up in a convent. As for Sophie, she threw off the mask, braved the talk, put on rouge and beauty marks, went out into society, and had affairs” (21). Thereafter, Sophie and her jewel will be telling the same story, not contradicting herself like all the other woman in the novel. Diderot was keenly interested in the mind–body problem, and The Indiscreet Jewels must be the funniest treatment of that dichotomy.
Again like Voltaire (who is fulsomely praised in chapter 40 of the novel), Diderot’s irreverence for the novel as a literary form allowed him to mock its conventions (though such mockery was itself becoming a convention by this time). Following Crébillon’s examples—The Skimmer seems to have been a greater inspiration than The Sofa—the novel pretends to be a translation of an ancient African work, with occasional defects in the manuscript. (There’s a lacuna just as the author begins to tell of the woman into anal; the narrator invites scholars to “consider whether this break might not be a voluntary omission on the part of the author, dissatisfied with what he had written and finding nothing better to say” [41]; elsewhere the narrator admits he’s skipping parts of the original.) He pushes Lesage’s conceit of the novelist as voyeur to invasively intimate extremes, but in the name of candor, not prurience. Diderot pokes fun at other novels of the time, parodies Crébillon’s convoluted style in The Wayward Head and Heart in one chapter (39), and concludes another with this partly illegible doctor’s prescription for insomnia:
Take some . . .
some . . .
some . . .
some . . .
of Marianne and Peasant . . . four pages
&
nbsp; of Wayward Heart, one page . . .
of The Confessions [by Duclos], twenty-five and one-half lines (46, modified)
Captain Lemuel Gulliver appears briefly to translate the neighing of a mare’s jewel. Some of the chapters have facetious titles, and one polylingual chapter (47), devoted to a well-traveled jewel, contains passages from pornographic novels in English, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, which Diderot’s friends supplied him. Chapters are devoted to allegorical dreams, dream analysis, and a traveler’s tale about a land of mechanical sex. There is one chapter on drama criticism that so impressed Lessing he copied it into his Hamburg Dramaturgy, others on music and literary criticism, and a parody of an academic gathering, where scientists “debated the issue of the talking jewels”—one scientist is tempted to insult another by telling him “that he reasoned like a jewel”—and where anatomists compare the vagina to the trachea and vow, like Frankenstein building a female monster, “to make delphus and jewel alike reason, speak, and even sing before you” (9). No female scientists are present.
Later in life Diderot regretted this work—which didn’t prevent him from writing three more chapters for it—but The Indiscreet Jewels is a dazzling setting of literary pastiche, learned wit, philosophical speculation, and cultural criticism. Its insights into sexual politics are penetrating remarkable, and this jewel peach sweetheart of a novel deserves to be more highly appraised.
Diderot’s low opinion of novels changed after he discovered Samuel Richardson’s epistolary fictions and learned how effective novels can be when the reader identifies with its characters, and when those characters inhabit a carefully furnished realistic setting (not an allegorical French Congo with gossipy genitals). Diderot applied those lessons well in his second novel, The Nun (La Religieuse), written in 1760 but not published until 1780. The difference between it and his first novel is like night and day, as the original African author of The Indiscreet Jewels would say (“who would hang himself rather than miss a cliché” [47]). Although it too speaks out against female oppression, it is grim and dark where the other is bawdy and light, tightly organized rather than rambling, focused rather than vague about its moral purpose, and an early example of the Gothic novel rather than a late imitation of the pseudo-Oriental tale. The Nun raps the knuckles of one of Voltaire’s recurring pests, Catholicism’s monastic system, and especially the outrage of forcing youngsters with no religious vocation into these prisons. An illegitimate girl named Suzanne Simonin is sent to one by her embarrassed parents and wants out: the novel takes the form of a long letter intended for the Marquis de Croismare, pleading for his intervention. (A real person, the marquis was a friend of Diderot who had taken an interest in a similar nun’s plight; as a joke, Diderot sent him letters supposedly written by this nun, which the marquis took seriously enough that Diderot abandoned the joke by killing her off. But he got so wrapped up in his hoax that he decided to convert it into a novel.) Suzanne explains to Croismare that a lawyer has submitted a brief for her case, but it had little effect, for “there was too much intelligence and not enough pathos in it, and hardly any real arguments” (101). Her account pumps up the pathos and makes a stirring argument for abolishing the monastery system, even burning convents down if necessary.
Rebellious Suzanne is shuttled from one convent to another, where she suffers at the hands of various mothers superior: the first practices a kind of spiritual “seduction” (Suzanne’s word, 47) to keep her girls in thrall, while the second tortures her almost to death; the third is a lesbian who can’t keep her hands off the beautiful but woefully naïve 20-year-old, and who goes mad after Suzanne reports her to her confessor. Suzanne’s account of cloistral life is utterly absorbing, and seems too sensational to be true until one looks at the historical record; one critic who did reports that “the alleged fiction of Diderot falls considerably short of reality” in this regard.177 Like Voltaire (and decidedly unlike Richardson), Diderot holds our attention with a rapid succession of dramatic scenes, quickly building and maintaining both sympathy for Suzanne and outrage at the convent system, not for its religious teachings—atheist Diderot tolerates Suzanne’s unwavering religious beliefs—but for going “against the universal law of nature” (176) by segregating people from society, which even naïve Suzanne understands (and which nature-boy Rousseau didn’t, in Diderot’s opinion): “Man is born for life in society; separate him, isolate him, and his ideas will go to pieces, his character will go sour, a hundred ridiculous affections will spring up in his heart, extravagant notions will take root in his mind like tares in the wilderness. Put a man in a forest and he will turn into a wild beast, but in a cloister, where a feeling of duress combines with that of servitude, it is worse still. There is a way out of a forest, there is none out of a cloister; a man is free in the forest but he is a slave in the cloister” (136). The “folly of shutting up young and vigorous creatures in a tomb” (177) is both an example of l’infâme and a metaphor for all other forms of oppression.
At the end of the novel, after Suzanne has escaped from her convent with the help of her new confessor—who likewise was forced into the cloistered life—she falls on hard times, which is when she reviews the document she’s been compiling for the marquis. Rereading it, she realizes she has unconsciously made repeated reference to her beauty and hopes her correspondent doesn’t think she’s addressing herself “not to his charity but to his lust,” though she admits, “I am a woman, and perhaps a bit coquettish, who can tell?” (189). (This postscript registers Diderot’s own surprise when he reread the manuscript in 1780 to prepare it for publication.) Like Sylvie in Villedieu’s Memoirs, Suzanne unconsciously or not titillates the reader with images of her long hair waterfalling out of her headdress, various wardrobe malfunctions, and reports of what Mother Superior said about her “fresh ruby lips” and “that lovely bosom, those legs, that body, that firm, soft, white flesh of yours” (134, 147). Suzanne describes an orgasm Mother Superior enjoys while rubbing against her, puzzled both by her superior’s reaction and by her own dazed and confused feelings afterward. Does she anticipate the effect such details will have on her male correspondent? “Who can tell?” as she coquettishly says, though she might have guessed from the Mother Superior’s reaction to Suzanne’s life story, recounted “more or less as I have been writing it to you:
I cannot describe the effect it produced upon her, the sighs she heaved, the tears she shed, her expressions of indignation. . . . Now and again she stopped me, stood up, walked about, then resumed her place, or she would raise her hands and eyes to heaven and then bury her head in my lap. When I told her about the scene in the dungeon and that of my exorcism and my public confession she almost shouted aloud, and when I ended my tale and stopped speaking she remained for some time bent over her bed with her head buried in the coverlet and arms stretched out above her head. [After railing against Suzanne’s tormentors,] She pushed aside my collar and coif, opened the top of my dress and my hair fell loose over my bare shoulders; my breast was half uncovered and her kisses spread over my neck, bare shoulders, and half-naked breast. (141–42)
That may or not be the reaction she hopes for from the marquis, but that’s the reaction Diderot had to reading Richardson, and the one he wanted for The Nun. He was no doubt aware that his novel trades in tropes exploited by the anticlerical pornographers of the time—the erotically charged convent setting, repressed and/or lesbian sexuality, acts of sadomasochistic “religious” discipline, lascivious monks, ad nauseam—but the result is a powerful, painterly depiction of a way of life rarely glimpsed beyond the parlor grill in other literary novels, an Enlightenment manifesto for freedom, and a devastating attack on an inhuman institution that, unlike legalized slavery, still exists in civilized nations.
Over the next dozen years, as Diderot continued to produce the Encyclopedia, write mediocre plays, and review art exhibits, he wrote three idiosyncratic dialogue-novels, never published in book form during his lifetime: the first, Rameau’s Nephew (Le
Neveu de Rameau, 1761, touched up in subsequent years), is a hugely entertaining conversation in a Parisian café between the great composer Jean Philippe Rameau’s nephew—an eccentric, failed musician living by his half-crazed wits by sponging off the demimonde of actresses and critics—and a character he facetiously addresses as Mr. Philosopher, essentially Diderot himself. (The two knew each other and undoubtedly had conversations that inspired this one.) Their animated conversation lurches all over the place from discussions of morality to music, from the uses of literature to the purpose of life, resulting in a dizzying, exhilarating melange of (in translator Tancock’s reckoning) “the literary satire, the social satire, the philosophical argument, the moral question, the cynical nihilism of Rameau, the fictional framework, the real life-story of Rameau, the realistic novel, the comic masterpiece, the picture of manners and last, but doubtless not least in Diderot’s own mind, Diderot’s personal grudge against the literary clique which had booed his own dramatic efforts” (30).