The name Mata Hari ("the eye of dawn", in Malay), just like the enigmatic Oriental persona that came with it, was pure inspired invention. Mata Hari's real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. Despite the claims of a sacred Hindu lineage, Mata Hari was born in Holland in 1876 to a Dutch father and a mother with Javanese roots.
When she was 18 she married a 38-year-old Dutch military officer, Rudolph MacLeod, and followed him to Java. The couple had two kids. One, a boy, was poisoned by the native nanny, allegedly in response to the master of the house brutalising her some time earlier. Rudolph was abusive not only to his servants. A heavy-drinking philanderer, he regularly mistreated his young wife. Perhaps most women of her generation would have resigned themselves to a life with an unfaithful and cruel man. Margaretha did not. She ran away in 1904 and metamorphosed into Mata Hari.
It did not take long for the fabricated Oriental persona to become more real than the real thing. More than a decade later, at Mata Hari's trial in Paris, the prosecutors familiar with her true identity still spoke of the woman in front of them as an Asiatic savage, a person utterly alien, in her culture, skin and mentality, to European latitudes. It was a coup for Mata Hari, the self-made performer and con artist.
The act, which made Mata Hari famous all across Europe, was what you would call erotic exotica - sex cross-fertilised with mystique, an early 20th-century multicultural striptease. She came on stage wearing veils and a body stocking.
As a barely clad Javanese maid, she danced to a revered Hindu idol with all the suggestion of passionate unconditional surrender. It was all too easy for men in the audience to feel they could be gods too, if only they could get close to that uncommonly tall body taunting them from under the see-through veils.
Today her act could barely make it in a provincial drag club, but in the beginning of the 20th century it clearly hit a nerve. The fabricated Oriental roots lent a priceless authenticity to Mata Hari's brand of dancing, taking her well beyond dingy underground clubs and private lesbian parties to considerable venues in Monte Carlo, Paris and Milan, including the coveted La Scala. Her Orientalism would also make her such an obvious, inviting target for espionage accusations at the outbreak of the First World War. After all, here was a woman, a sore in the public's eye, predatory, depraved and obscenely foreign.
As a celebrity courtesan, Mata Hari had a long list of illustrious and well-paying patrons, mainly in uniform. A rare man could resist her famed powers of seduction. Mata Hari's decadent way of life, tolerated, even admired before the war, became a source of deep irritation and unease once the hardships, death and fear spread through the European countries.
IN PARTICULAR, THE WAY Mata Hari was known to use sex as a weapon seemed to make the general public downright queasy. After all, it exposed the fatal weaknesses of army and government officials - the men supposedly in charge of running and defending their countries. In an attempt to shift the blame from the men, the public imbued international courtesans such as Mata Hari with almost supernatural powers of seduction and manipulation.
Although she was only one of an estimated 10 women and 300 men executed by the French for espionage, Mata Hari alone is remembered and tirelessly mythologised to this day. She alone stands as a universally recognisable symbol of erotic espionage. In the words of Julie Wheelwright, the author of The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage, Mata Hari remains the 20th century's "most important icon of female betrayal". Her alleged espionage activities were linked to nothing less than the deaths of at least 50,000 French soldiers.
Yet the charges of espionage on which Mata Hari was convicted and executed are disputed to this day. Her prosecutor, Andre Mornet, would later admit that during her 1917 trial, "There was not enough evidence to whip a cat."
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