In 1930, Major Thomas Coulson wrote one of the first accounts of Mata Hari based on his military experiences and interactions with her. In the book, he romanticizes Mata Hari while simultaneously cementing her guilt as a spy.^[1] His account focuses on her courtesan occupation as the gateway to her espionage tendencies. He justifies her execution as a fair punishment for betraying the Allied forces. Fictionalized narratives of Mata Hari’s life and unfortunate death flooded the print market as well.^[2] These books depicted Mata Hari as a spy and a devious woman as they reconstructed her life based on questionable facts and hearsay.

In 1965, a critical biographical account of Mata Hari was added to the spurious historiography. Sam Waagenaar, an author and actor from the Netherlands, possessed an interest in the dancer-spy that was piqued by the Hollywood production of Mata Hari (1931). He claimed his biography was the first true report of her life.^[3] He gathered information from oral histories of people who were close to her. Waagenaar included information from documents unknown to the public, including proceedings from the French War Department that contradicted previous biographies. Waagenaar had unprecedented access to a private collection of Mata Hari’s personal belongings and scrapbooks.^[4] His account marked a transition of the popular image of Mata Hari as a devious spy void of humanity to a victim of her circumstances. Although many publications continued to mythologize her life, Waagenaar’s book offered a more sympathetic treatment.

Other historians have followed suit. In 1986, Russell Warren Howe, an international journalist and former Royal Air Force pilot, expanded on Waagenaar’s work.^[5] Howe verified the facts in Waagenaar’s biography and conducted further research using newly de-classified documents from Britain and France. Howe’s aim was to provide an accurate report of Mata Hari’s life and death and debunk the myths surrounding her story.^[6]

^[1] Thomas Coulson, Mata Hari: Courtesan and Spy (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1930).

^[2] Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, The Eye of the Lion: A Novel Based on the Life of Mata Hari (Boston,: Little, Brown & Company, 1964); Erika Ostrovsky, Eye of Dawn: The Rise and Fall of Mata Hari (New York: MacMillan, 1978); Richard Skinner, The Red Dancer: The Life and Times of Mata Hari: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2002); Edward Huebsch, The Last Summer of Mata Hari (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979).

^[3] Sam Waagenaar, Mata Hari: A Biography (New York: Appleton- Century, 1965).

^[4] Sam Waagenaar explains in his introduction that he received the personal items and memorabilia of Mata Hari from people close to her as well as conducted oral histories. He also details how he found documents unknown to the public and personally went to the Scotland Yard Metropolitan Police for their documents, Mata Hari: A Biography (New York: Appleton- Century, 1965). His collection is in the Fries Museum Mata Hari online exhibit. https://www.friesmuseum.nl/en/collection/icons/mata-hari.

^[5] Russell Warren Howe, Mata Hari: The True Story (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986).

^[6] Russell Warren Howe, in his author’s note, explains how he combed through legal documents and notes from previous historians in which he found errors. Howe claims his book seeks to find the true answers of Mata Hari’s life within his own research and connections. Russell Warren Howe, Mata Hari: The True Story (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986), ix-xi.

With the de-mystification of Mata Hari and her narrative, she has been recently studied within historical contexts and how her life reflects significant insights into history and women’s history. As the field of women’s history developed, the examination of women, espionage, and the trope of the femme fatale spy gained more scholarly attention. Tammy M. Proctor and Julie Wheelwright were among the first scholars to study women in espionage. Wheelwright claimed that Mata Hari was constructed as an enemy of the European allies during a time of upheaval over women’s changing social roles.^[1] Mata Hari, Wheelwright argues, had to be portrayed as a “savage” and as the “other” to justify her execution. Wheelwright argues that Mata Hari became a symbol for independent women, as her media portrayals revealed anxieties about female intelligence workers and national security.^[2] Proctor’s scholarship focuses on Britain and female espionage during World War I.^[3] Proctor argues that Mata Hari became the leading icon of female intelligence and aided in the construction of cultural images of the sexual and seductive female spy. Proctor claims that the femme fatale spy character of Mata Hari obscured women’s actual contributions to intelligence work.

Mata Hari has also been investigated by scholars in the context of the femme fatale archetype and its connections to gender. Kirsten Smith argues that Mata Hari originated the femme fatale spy archetype in film.^[4] Smith shows that the femme fatale characters were utilized as a response to threatened gender norms. The femme fatale spy archetype that Mata Hari inspired, centered women’s ambitions and sexuality that were considered undesirable.^[5] Rosie White expressed that Mata Hari’s femme fatale characterization stereotypes women in espionage as catalysts of betrayal. White acknowledged that characteristics of female sexuality and femininity were ideal for espionage.^[6] Women were seen as deceptive, an important skill of a spy. White argues that Mata Hari’s mythologization as an Oriental spy echoed simultaneous anxieties about race, class, and gender in Europe at the time.

Scholars have drawn parallels between Mata Hari and the changing roles of women in the early twentieth century. Paola Carmagnani points out that Mata Hari’s rise to popularity coincided with the European transition to modernity.^[7] Carmagnani argues that Mata Hari seamlessly fit into the transformation of women’s societal changes in Europe. Mata Hari’s death, according to Carmagnani, came at the peak of loosened sexual mores in France and coincided with both changes in women’s roles and the fears of men perpetuated by the Great War. Aiman Naeem and Mehran Ali examine Paul Coelho’s The Spy (2016), a novel about Mata Hari. Naeem and Ali insist that her characteristics in the novel were similar to the traits of “the new woman” of the 1920s.^[8] Instead of being displayed as a passive female, Naeem and Ali assert that she opposed the nineteenth and early twentieth century notions of femininity. As this thesis shows, Mata Hari’s legacy was used similarly in the American media.

^[1] Julie Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Female in Espionage (London: Collins & Brown, 1992); Julie Wheelwright, “The Language of Espionage: Mata Hari and the Creation of the Spy-Courtesan,” in Languages and the First World War: Representation and Memory, eds. Christophe Declercq and Julian Walker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 164-177.

^[2] Julie Wheelwright, “Poisoned Honey: The Myth of Women in Espionage,” Queen’s Quarterly 100, no. 2 (2019): 3-17.

^[3] Tammy M. Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

^[4] Kirsten Smith, “Seduction and Sex: The Changing Allure of the Femme Fatale in Fact and Fiction,” in Revisiting Female Evil: Power, Purity, and Desire, eds. Melissa Deary, Susana Nicolas, and Roger Davis (Boston: Brill, 2017), 37-52.

^[5] Kirsten Smith, “’Keep Mum, She’s Definitely not Dumb’: The Complex and Cunning Femme Fatale in Espionage Fiction and History,” in Perceiving Evil: Evil Women and the Feminine, eds. David Farnell, Rute Noiva, and Kristen Smith (Boston: Brill, 2015), 129-138.

^[6] Rosie White, “‘You’ll be the Death of Me’: Mata Hari and the Myth of the Femme Fatale,” in The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, eds. Helen Hanson and Catherine O’ Rawe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 72-85.

^[7] Paola Carmagnani, “Mata Hari: An Icon of Modernity,” in Plots and Plotters: Double Agents and Villains in Spy Fictions, ed. Carmen Concilio (Milan: Mimesis International, 2015), 33-53.

^[8] Aiman Naeem and Mehran Ali, “Mata Hari as a New Woman in Paul Coelho’s Novel The Spy: Magnifying Hari’s Subjugation Through a Feminist Lens,” International Journal of Literature, Linguistics and Translation Studies 3, no.1 (June 2023): 1-13.

A few scholars have studied the images and portrayals of Mata Hari in the media aside from the femme fatale archetype. Elske Tjepkema examines the images of Mata Hari in various mediums of media in the Netherlands. Tjepkema analyzes the interactions between popular historical conventions of Mata Hari and the historical conventions in academia. Tjepkema examines how the discourse between these standards create the perceptions of Mata Hari regionally and nationally within the Netherlands.^[1] Julie Wheelwright and Adriënne Ummels have studied the Dutch media’s coverage of Mata Hari’s exhibit in the Fries Museum. Wheelwright and Ummels argue that the media and the exhibit’s constructed narrative created a more sympathetic view of Mata Hari by contextualizing her experiences within those of other European women in the early twentieth century.^[2] Amy Sargeant examines a film based on Mata Hari titled, A Woman Redeemed (1927). Sargeant contended that the film demonstrates the importance of Mata Hari’s story in the interwar period, as her portrayal on screen was specifically developed to appeal to 1920s audiences.^[3]

^[1] Elske Tjepkema, “The Image of Mata Hari Remains: The Representation of Mata Hari in Various Media in the Netherlands in Relation to Her Regional and National Characterization” (master’s thesis, Radboud University, 2016), http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/3660.

^[2] Julie Wheelwright and Adriënne Ummels, “Marketing Coup or Paradigm Shift? Reflections of the Dutch Media Interpretations of the 2017 ‘Mata Hari: de Mythe en het Meisje?’” Journalism 24, no. 10 (July 2022): 1-18.

^[3] Amy Sargeant, “The Return of Mata Hari: A Woman Redeemed (Sinclair Hill, 1927),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 30, no.1 (March 2010): 37-54.

Mata Hari has also been closely associated with Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. Said argues that Orientalism is the intellectual system of Western ideology, knowledge, and generalization of the “Orient,” or the East, to classify its otherness and inferiority for the legitimization of Western cultural dominance and political power.^[1] Ziauddin Sardar, claims that Mata Hari is an embodiment of personified Orientalism.^[2] Her lived reality was superimposed on her literary life and the discourse between fact and her fictionalized Orientalist identity. Therefore, Mata Hari displays the very discourse of Orientalism; a concept of what is the East based on Western interpretations. Several scholars have produced scholarship pertaining to Orientalist perceptions and appropriations of Mata Hari’s dancing.^[3] These scholars explore the exoticism of Mata Hari and Eastern dances against the historical backdrop of World War I and the change of women’s roles and norms. Romita Ray examines photographs of Mata Hari. Ray concludes that Mata Hari’s embodiment of Orientalist images and practices helped to sabotage her national identity and justify her guilt due to anxieties sustained by the war.^[4] Ray also argues that Mata Hari served as a symbol of the fetishization and appropriation of the Orient. The photographs of her dances and costumes expunged her Dutch origins by replacing her identity with a Hindu temple dancer. The notions of Mata Hari and Orientalism investigated by these scholars serve as a jumping point into the examination of American Orientalism. Mata Hari’s portrayals in the U.S. media display similar dynamics. Traits of Mata Hari such as betrayal, treason, and unmanaged femininity were concluded to be derived from her Orientalist identity. The fabricated Orientalist portrayal corrupted the American perceptions of other nations, specifically Southeast Asia, Germany, and the Netherlands. The produced knowledge of the East created by the adversarial Orientalist depictions of Mata Hari reflect the attitudes some Americans held of nationalism and American supremacy.

^[1] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).

^[2] Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999).

^[3] Florina Codreanu, “The Dance of Death from Salome to Mata Hari,” in Death Within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, ed. Adriana Teodorescu (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 224-243; Donnalee Dox, “Dancing Around Orientalism,” The Drama Review 50, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 52-71; Alexandra Kolb, “Mata Hari’s Dance in the Context of Femininity and Exoticism,” Mandrágora : Revista do Grupo de Estudos de Gênero e Religião Mandrágora 15, (2009): 58-67.

^[4] Romita Ray, “Orientalizing the Bayadère/ Fabricating Mata Hari,” Photographies 5, no. 1 (March 2012): 87-111.

This thesis adds a unique insight to the existing historiography. Despite several analyses of the U.S. film Mata Hari (1931) starring Greta Garbo, scholars have not comprehensively analyzed Mata Hari’s changing portrayals in American newspapers and books.^[1] The media invoked her legend to respond to the political, social, and cultural anxieties of the decades. Over time media portrayals of Mata Hari evolved in response to developments in women’s roles, norms, and behaviors in addition to changes in the geopolitical climate both during and after World War I. The portrayals of her communicate the racial, economic, demographic, and political attitudes of many in the U.S. regarding Germany and Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century. The media’s discussion of Mata Hari provided windows into the conflict and racial ideologies that led to constructed American nationalism and national affairs from 1917 to 1929. Media portrayals of the exotic dancer exhibit the manipulation of figures in history to construct and provide different perspectives of American canon.

The First World War brought women’s sexuality and femininity into question as an issue of national security prompted by the threats of sexually transmitted diseases and female espionage. Mata Hari’s story gave the media an opportunity to comment on undesirable expressions of femininity and sexuality during war time. At the same time, Mata Hari’s execution was celebrated as a revengeful victory for Allied casualties. Her alleged espionage work and death were used by the media to rally against the enemy. Mata Hari’s “Oriental” identity became one focus of the media, which not only showcased the fetishization of the East, but also created negative interpretations of Southeast Asia in the American consciousness.

Mata Hari’s image changed in the 1920s, just as women’s roles, norms, and behaviors changed. The path of liberation was rooted in the fight for suffrage and equality. Many women pushed the boundaries of femininity. Maternal and modest roles and behaviors confined women during World War I. After getting the vote and the conflict ended, women became bolder participants in society. Women held sexual agency and could choose to abstain from motherhood. Mata Hari’s image shifted from a villainized exhibitionist of inapt femininity into what encompassed the modern female. The modern femme expressed herself through fashion, attitude, and female power marked by the decade. Discussions of Mata Hari revealed perceptions of women and those categorized as “others” in the cultural and societal discourse of the 1920s.

^[1] Michael Williams, “Idols and Idolatry: Greta Garbo and Romon Navarro in Mata Hari (1931)” in Film Stardom and the Ancient Past: Idols, Artefacts, and Epics, Michael Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 25-28; Theodore Shank, “Nightfire’s Femme Fatale: The Invention of Personality,” The Drama Review 25, no.3 (Autumn 1993): 84-87; Zsófia Anna Tóth, “Greta Garbo, Her Transgressions and Unconventional Ways on and off Screen,” Brno Studies in English 34, no.1 (2008): 105- 124.