‘The Most Dangerous Woman on Earth’: Sexuality in British Spy Literature During World War I

Laurie-Fletcher, Danny

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03852-6_7

Danny Laurie-Fletcher²

220 Accesses

Abstract

Historian Susan Kingsley Kent made the assertion that ‘Victorian ideology finally offered only two possible images for women. They might be either the idealised wife and mother, the angel in the house, or the debased, depraved, corrupt prostitute.’ Female characters in British spy literature during World War I are for the most part divided between those seen as being good and those seen as being bad. While the heroines of the literature did not challenge outright the ideal of women being pure, they did modify it to suit the needs of the war effort. In contrast to one type of woman whose feminine qualities were questioned in spy stories of the period is the highly sexual and foreign woman. These women are depicted as corrupting influences in British society. This representation paralleled with wartime legislation such as the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) in 1914 and its consequent amendments that in part were aimed at restricting venereal diseases by focusing on women. Overall the depiction of women in spy stories helps to reinforce the Victorian stereotypes of two different women: ‘the angel in the house, or the debased, depraved, corrupt prostitute’.

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Notes

1.
Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1880–1914, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Guildford, 1987, 60.
2.
Branca, Silent Sisterhood, 127.
3.
Branca, Silent Sisterhood, 127.
4.
Caine, Destined to be Wives, 102–105.
5.
Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, 67.
6.
Brazil, Patriotic Schoolgirl, 122–123.
7.
Quoted in Angela Woollacott, ‘“Khaki Fever” and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 29, no. 2 (April 1994), 329.
8.
‘Women Drunkards: Will They be Forbidden in the Public Houses’, The Daily Chronicle, 30 October 1914, 3.
9.
Suzann Buckley, ‘The Failure to Resolve the Problems of Venereal Disease Among the Troops in Britain During World War I’, eds. Brain Bond & Ian Roy, War and Society: A Yearbook of Military History, vol. 2, Croom Helm, London, 1977, 71.
10.
A substance to induce an abortion by miscarriage.
11.
Philippa Levine, ‘“Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should”: Women Police in World War I’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 66, no. 1 (March 1994), 35.
12.
This regulation was rejected by military authorities such as Field Marshall Douglas Haig, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, because there had been an existing tradition regulating prostitution to control VDs. Edward H. Beardsley, ‘Allied Against Sin: American and British Responses to Venereal Disease in World War I’, Medical History, vol. 20, no. 2 (April 1976), 199.
13.
Buchan, Mr. Standfast, 255.
14.
Clouston, ‘Spy in Black’, 209.
15.
Clouston, ‘Spy in Black’, 217.
16.
Rickard, The Light Above the Cross Road, 156, 166, 261, 263, 265.
17.
Clouston, ‘Spy in Black’, 292.
18.
Clouston, ‘Spy in Black’, 301.
19.
Oppenheim, The Double Traitor, 3. Non-Prussian German or Austrian characters in some British spy literature of World War I are portrayed sympathetically as compared with the Prussians. These differences are expressed in Clubfoot, in which Bavarians are labelled as ‘easy going’ compared to Prussians being ‘disciplined’. Furthermore, Schmidt, a captured German spy, in The Secret Monitor, helps Gowna against von Husen because ‘I was never a friend of Von [sic] Husen. He’s a Prussian officer, and I am Bavarian.’ Williams, Clubfoot, 106, 217, 268; Guy Thorne, The Secret Monitor, Skeffington, London, 1918, 150.
20.
Cameron, Zenia, 8.
21.
Cameron, Zenia, 102.
22.
Oppenheim, The Double Traitor, 230–231.
23.
Quoted in Proctor, Female Intelligence, 29.
24.
Oppenheim, The Double Traitor, 176.
25.
Oppenheim, The Double Traitor, 177.
26.
Oppenheim, The Double Traitor, 269.
27.
W. Holt-White, ‘The Beautiful Spy’, The Daily Express, 3 April 1915, 6.
28.
Ferdinand Tuohy, The Secret Corps, John Murray, London, 1920, 23; Rupert Allason, The Branch: A History of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch 1883–1983, Secker & Warburg, London, 1983, 66; Thomson, Queer People, 13.
29.
Pat Shipman, Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari, HarperCollins, New York, 2007, 150, 165.
30.
Mundy, The Winds of the World, 18–19, 55.
31.
Mundy, King, of the Khyber Rifles, 238.
32.
Flatau, “Yellow” English, 45.
33.
Flatau, “Yellow” English, 128–129.
34.
Flatau, “Yellow” English, 148.
35.
Flatau, “Yellow” English, 196.
36.
Elinor Glyn, The Price of Things [1919], The Authors’ Press, Auburn (New York), 1924, 24.
37.
Proctor, Female Intelligence, 126.
38.
NA KV 1/4, Intelligence Methods 1909, 30.
39.
Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist, and Whore, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, 49.
40.
Cockburn, Bestseller, 15.
41.
Quoted in Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, 177.
42.
Nicholas Hiley ‘Decoding German Spies, British Spy Fiction, 1908–1918’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 5. (October 1990), 64–65.
43.
Hiley ‘Decoding German Spies, British Spy Fiction, 1908–1918’, 64.
44.
Quoted in Hiley, ‘Decoding German Spies, British Spy Fiction, 1908–1918’, 65.
45.
Le Queux, The German Spy, 17–18.
46.
Buchan, ‘The Power-House’, 731.
47.
Buchan, Greenmantle, 113.
48.
Cameron, Zenia, 135.
49.
Quoted in Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World, HarperCollins Academic, Hammersmith (London), 1991, 131–132.
50.
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel [1905], Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1944, 112, 119, 202; Baroness Orczy, The Elusive Pimpernel: A Romance, Hutchinson, London, 1908, 17, 119, 211, 325; Baroness Orczy, El Dorado: A Romance of the Scarlet Pimpernel [1913], Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1956, 37, 91.
51.
Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, 85.
52.
H. Rider Haggard, She [1887], Wordsworth, Ware (England), 1995, 106.
53.
Bristow, Empire Boys, 140.
54.
Buchan, Greenmantle, 234.
55.
Schwabing used this occupation as his main disguise in The Thirty-Nine Steps, reflecting reality of pre-war archaeologists being used as spies in the Middle East.
56.
Buchan, Greenmantle, 247.
57.
Buchan, Greenmantle, 249.
58.
Buchan, Greenmantle, 370.
59.
Buchan, Greenmantle, 265–266.

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College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Danny Laurie-Fletcher

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Laurie-Fletcher, D. (2019). ‘The Most Dangerous Woman on Earth’: Sexuality in British Spy Literature During World War I. In: British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03852-6_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03852-6_7
Published: 01 March 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03851-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03852-6
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