An Ode to the Cloister
- robyncoombes
- Jan 14
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 16
This blog began with a list of recommended “nun literature” that I came across on Instagram – not a genre I had ever considered really, being more inclined to read anything set anywhere outside of a convent. But I was already familiar with one of the suggestions, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which now I did think of it, I had read one bleak midwinter and loved. So to the library I went (maybe impelled by the austere spirit of January which just seemed fitting).
Common to all the “nun literature” I have now read (still not a staggering sum) is the comparison of convent life to prison. No surprises there really. Both the place - the abbey - and the community within - the sisterhood – is often described as a sentence; in Lauren Groff’s Matrix, both are a “living death” (8, 10), while “the people of the countryside found the abbey a dark and strange and piteous place, a place to inspire fear” (10). In Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, “the nuns belonged to a strictly enclosed Benedictine order and had very limited dealings with the outside world” (47). Here, the abbey lies alongside a lay community, newly established to have the benefit of spiritual life while remaining part of everyday society, but there is little interference between the two. Not many are prepared to enter the “enclosed order of nuns” where “[n]o one goes in or comes out” (65). In fact, “only the strongest achieve it” (65).
As suggested by the title of Antonia White’s Frost in May, the stringent conditions of the novel’s convent school are as likely to produce fragile plants as hardy specimens, but few thrive outside the cloister – our protagonist Nanda observes that Mother Pascoe “was one of the few nuns whom one could imagine transplanted into the outside world” (25). In The Bell, this rootedness is a deliberate “vow of stability”, wherein “they remain all their lives in the house where they take their first vows. They die and are buried inside in the nuns’ cemetery” (65).
But there seems little incentive to pledge oneself to this life; Nanda is told that her strict adherence to the convent’s rules is a sin in and of itself; “[t]he trouble about your faults is that they don’t show […] if a child of nine can be said to have spiritual pride, spiritual pride is your ruling vice” (36). Much like Ann Beattie’s A Wonderful Stroke of Luck (2019), or Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), the powerful influence that schooling can exert on students’ futures is explored to startling effect. Perhaps best described as a trauma novel, Beattie places the irresponsible teachings of charismatic Pierre LaVerdere alongside the events of 9/11 as the central catalysts, while the charming, cruel Miss Brodie wields a disturbing power over her students – “[g]ive me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life” (9). But Nanda and her classmates are not only circumscribed by the convent, its fearsome Mothers, and its many, every-shifting privations; they are threatened with the ultimate prison should they slightly stray from the ordained path. Poor Rose, who committed the mortal sin of eating a sweet on the way to her First Communion, “had [she] died before she left the church that morning, she would have passed straight from God’s holy table into the fires of hell” (63).
In her introduction to the 2018 Virago edition of Frost in May, Tessa Hadley describes “the closed, heated world of the convent school” (vii), and later this same “hothouse, languishing, snobbish, authoritarian, sensual-spiritual world” (ix). Moreover, Hadley refers to the convent’s “grown alumnae”, whose return “Nanda watches with particular keenness … can she become like any of these women? Some of the Old Children are sweet-scented, flaunting their bloom … wearing their Child of Mary medals” (xi). Like hothouse flowers forced to fruition, the convent seems intent only on cultivating objects of beauty and piety. Though not quite the “hot-bed of luxurious indolence” Mary Wollstonecraft critiqued, (124), it is a sort of “barren blooming” (20), brought on by “a false system of education” devised by men (Wollstonecraft 21).
As Hadley contends, this glasshouse environment, though wholly populated by women, is not removed from male influence - “The women and girls in the convent school exist in some sense inside the frame of male control: the schoolgirls depend ultimately on their fathers and brothers just as, ultimately, the whole life of the convent depends upon the encompassing patriarchal structures of the Catholic church” (viii–ix). In Matrix, the convent is a refuge from patriarchal society, but a grim one to begin with. In unsparing detail, Groff evokes the sisters’ suffering – “So hungry, the nuns’ faces are skulls skinned of flesh … There are soups in which meat is boiled and removed to save for future soups. Fingernails the cold blue of sky” (33).
But Matrix is no mere ‘nun novel’ (Mere by Danielle Giles is incidentally the next on my list), instead a sweeping, immersive, and lyrical tale of an unconventional “giantess of a maiden” (4). Unlike others in its genre, Matrix begins and continues with a centripetal force, not contained by its setting but ever expansive. Emerging from the forest in the first page, “Marie who comes from France” (3) is capable of immense change, as hinted by her almost merrow-like “sealskin cloak” (4). Spanning decades, Marie transforms the abbey from an impoverished outpost on the brink of utter starvation to a thriving community and queer utopia complete with defensive labyrinth to keep out those pesky parishioners, aka men.
Nature is a transcendent force as much as it is a humbling and all-powerful one, destabilising the sisters’ faith in religious doctrine and presenting a more numinous conception of god and nature, and the interconnection of everything. It is no coincidence that Marie, a force of nature herself, is often figured as one with the natural world: “feeling the sun go down inside her” (8); “Over the landscape within her the chill of dusk blew, and all in shadow went grotesque with strangeness” (9).
This uncanny image reminds me of Murdoch’s The Bell, which depicts a pristine natural setting: a rarefied enclosure replete with seemingly healthy elm trees but haunted by the ghost of its vanished medieval bell. In an unheimlich scene (in the dead of night), Dora and Toby find and resurrect the bell – “an immense bulk rose slowly from the lake” (241) – which instantly insinuates itself like a true gothic motif. Murdoch’s language evokes uncanniness, and even ecogothic potential, by anxiously suggesting the ‘monstrous’ agency of a lake that can transform and destroy a once mighty manmade object. “The bell lay upon its side, the black hole of its mouth still jagged with mud … much encrusted with watery growths and shell-like incrustations … It lay there, gaping and enormous … a thing from another world” (242-3). Claimed by the water, it has become almost aquatic, but “[t]he thing was monstrous” (243). The unsettling undercurrent is the power and autonomy of nature to subvert, control, and transform even the most ‘sacrosanct’ object. For the titular bell is in fact name Gabriel, after the archangel himself.
What Murdoch is saying here has been interpreted in many ways, but the bell and the events surrounding it eventually dissolve the fabric of this community. Where Matrix ends on a note of triumph and connection, the characters of The Bell disperse. As Dora leaves (by lake), the peal “rang from another world” (350).
If I’ve learned anything from my brief foray into nun novels, it’s that cloistered worlds are never dull (in literature). Confining a group who by normal circumstances would, or should, not interact, is a recipe for some interesting developments. Sharing much with the school novel, or any genre dependent on a closed setting and communal living, such stories invite and usually employ subversions and diversions, so perhaps “nun literature” needs a rebrand - something less in the spirit of January?
Works Cited
Groff, Lauren. Matrix. Penguin Random House, 2021.
Murdoch, Iris. The Bell. 1973. Vintage, 1973.
Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 1961. Penguin Essentials, 2012.
White, Antonia. Frost in May. 1978. Virago Press, 2018.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and
Moral Subjects. 1792. Floating Press, 2010. ProQuest, www.ebookcentral-proquest-
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