Hypocritical sermons, thinly concealed with pious words and sighs, intertwine with pathological passions, with love-erotic attacks. Susanna does not stand. Her physically healthy and naturally developed nature, her understanding of natural, normal human life makes her horrified by everything she sees from everything she is forced to experience. She escapes from the monastery and she is willing to do the heavy physical work of a washerwoman. But the horrors she's been experiencing do not leave her, and though under a strange name she tends not to find her and return to the same monastery. Such is the sad story of Susanna Simone nice, smart, sensitive French girl. When Diderot narrates this story, at the same time, he draws the sad story of tens of thousands of maids pulled from the brink of the French people and sent to rinse their unhappy fate behind the monastery fences. He does not preach impatient and deliberate ones, he draws a lively, vivid and accurate image.
Susanna is distinguished by her personal personality, her spiritual and bodily qualities. Susanna is not passive and resigned to her fateful girl. She is an active, energetic, rebellious person. At any rate she wants to get rid of the monastery and with great effort escapes. The story, by the way, is convincing, overwhelming, emotionally agitated because it is transmitted by a girl who is deeply sensitive, highly responsive to vices and evil in life. She herself is not free from the prejudices of society and time, for example she is religious, but she understands everything in her life, naturally, naturally. And her tragedy is tenfold more violent when her simple and normal perceptions of life in the young and the soul are confronted with the perversion of the environment in which she falls not at her own will. This natural and inherent simplicity also determines the character of the exhibition.
Susanna tells, as she feels and understands, with no hesitation, no deeper thoughts, clear and definite, but always exciting. The novel poses the problem of human freedom and the right of choice, the will of man to reject the imperative imposed on him. Didero's text is a rebellion against religious institutions, against dogmatism and superstition. This is why the novel has been banned because it has been interpreted as anti-religious. "Religiosity" is present in two variations: faith and superstition. Sister Susan and the abbess of de Moni are the believers, before them God opens, they can communicate with him through his faith. For the nun, religion is a space of escape and comfort, in prayers she "hides" and isolates, then she is away from the collective. The space in Denis Diderots novel is closed, isolated. Closed space is actually a diminishing model of the external non-harmonic world, the small team is a projection of the societe, in which people are crowds, easily manipulated, can go after the hero, but they can trample it, as literally do the nuns in Diderot's novel.
The conceptual design of the author far exceeds the task of telling a nun's drama. It seeks to reveal the criminal and reactionary nature of the Catholic Church, the Jesuit, ultimately, the religion itself. The monastery where these shameful scenes are played is a generalized expression of all monasteries in France. The critique is based on the positions of enlightenment ideas, the protection of the victims of Catholicism is in the spirit of the enlightenment views of the "natural man."