La clôture is an enclosure which delineates and marks out a defined, limited spatial configuration within its protective walls. It is also an obstacle to the transgression of these boundaries which effectively bars the passage of travel from exterior to interior or vice versa. The monastery or convent can be seen to participate in the notion of the clôture: a space constituting an entire religious community behind the walls which separate it from the secular world. The clôture is inseparable from the essence of the convent in both structure and function. The architectural integrity of the convent, its structural planning and layout, can be conceived as what Michel de Certeau describes as a place or lieu: "A place is ... an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability." ¹ Once the construction of the place is completed, it is the interaction of the mobile elements within it that construct actual space. De Certeau explains that the geometrical place of a street is thus transformed into space through the "pedestrian speech acts" of the walkers which fill it: "space is a practiced place." ² In theory, religious ideology prevents the establishment of creative, individual trajectories within the convent through spatial and temporal coercion. Although the history of the convent's actualization extends from the Middle Ages to the present, it is in a sense a utopian community which has yet to be realized.

What is the effect on the individual body of prolonged confinement within the walls of the convent? Although the convent may have a blueprint for its general structure, how is the convent space deployed and ordered in specific cases? And most importantly, what happens to this tightly organized space when an element of disorder is introduced into a narrative structure which replicates the space of the convent structure? These questions are explored in depth in La religieuse, the story of a nun, Suzanne Simonin, who challenges the religious and legal system in an attempt to find freedom.

Within the context of the memoir novel, the disruption Suzanne causes in the spatial configuration of the convent is reflected in disjunctions on the narrative level. Narrative and physical space can be seen as co-existing or intersecting temporally within the diegesis: although Suzanne recounts the story from an extradiegetic and retrospective position, she continually "forgets" or denies knowledge of events she should now understand. We will see that it is in fact her body which bears marks or traces of her experiences and which replays them. In this way, Suzanne physically re-experiences the peripetia of her own diegesis, her body becoming the site of what I will describe as the "narrative event."

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¹ Michel De Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. 117.

² ibid., emphasis added.