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Honeytrap Lies and Women Spies

From Mata Hari to Camille in 'Quantum of Solace,' the female agent has been depicted as tough and beautiful. Is she symbolic of the demands on women today?

By Rosemary White

The stage is dominated by a statue of Shiva. As the lights go down, a woman emerges from the wings dressed in oriental costume; veils, a metal breastplate and elaborate jeweled headdress. She dances for Shiva, writhing around the statue in a suggestive and impassioned manner. A young soldier in the audience is entranced, while his older colleague looks on disapprovingly. This is a pivotal scene in George Fitzmaurice’s 1931 film Mata Hari, where we and the hero (Alexis, played by Ramon Navarro) get our first sight of the titular character and star, Greta Garbo.

Garbo was not the most obvious choice to play such an exotic role, but Hollywood in the 1930s seemed to regard any foreign star as representing a whole range of “other” nationalities, and so we have Garbo’s oddly unerotic dance sequence—at times almost stomping round the statue. What makes the scene even stranger is that this is a Swede playing a Dutch woman pretending to be a Javanese dancer.

This movie sequence, with its confused account of cultural and racialized identities, is a good example of the manifold mythologies surrounding women spies. There are many accounts of Mata Hari in fiction and in film. Her name itself is a byword for betrayal. The real Mata Hari was barely a spy, and accounts of her putative career in what many have called “the second oldest profession” only serve to establish that she was not very successful.