Abstract
Mata Hari, the infamous spy executed by the French during the First World War, haunts all subsequent accounts of women and espionage. The popular mythology that constructs Mata Hari as a classic femme fatale has produced a stereotype of the woman in espionage that rests on pejorative accounts of female sexuality and betrayal. Mata Hari’s real story is a morality tale of a different kind, as it maps the changing roles of women in modern Europe. In this regard she may be a feminist forerunner, but her myth is dependent on derogated accounts of gender, race and class. Above all, Mata Hari’s mythology feeds into the stereotype of the oriental villainess. In William Le Queux’s 1919 novel The Temptress a French femme fatale brings disaster with her fiendish plans to seduce and murder anyone who gets in her way. The temptress exhibits no motivation other than an inordinate desire for wealth and a lack of inhibition. Finally unmasked, she commits suicide with an overdose of morphine and the remaining characters are married off. Lord Hugh Trethowen, the central protagonist and victim, closes the novel: ‘I feel assured we shall now be happy and contented. Let us look only to a bright and prosperous future, and let us forget forever the grim shadow that fell upon us, the shadow of THE TEMPTRESS’ (Le Queux 1919: 250).
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© 2010 Rosie White
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White, R. (2010). ‘You’ll Be the Death of Me’: Mata Hari and the Myth of the Femme Fatale . In: Hanson, H., O’Rawe, C. (eds) The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230282018_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230282018_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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