femme fatale archetype

One of my favourite books is by Paulo Coelho, The Spy, which follows the struggles of an exotic dancer, seducer, and spy named Mata Hari. Her body exuded such grace that the wives of smitten men were convinced she was a witch.

She used all her charms to eventually mix with high-ranking officials of France, extending her services beyond the body and extracting valuable secrets from enemy nations. And when her true motives were exposed, she was shot by the same French nation she had served.

She is perhaps the most iconic embodiment of the femme fatale archetype — the dangerous, alluring woman whose power becomes her undoing.

This surely is a sensational story for a newspaper column, a book, or a film adaptation, no matter how tragic it is for the protagonist herself. The idea that a woman uses her charms and art of seduction and eventually gets punished for daring to enter a man's world — media loves to romanticize this type of female suffering.

Since the day she was executed, more than 250 novels and biographies have been published about her. Her heavily fictionalised versions of life were popularised from the 1930s and till today we have series that are watched and adaptations made.

Today, we know a different Mata Hari. Historians have since discovered that she exercised her own will entirely. She was simply a scapegoat in the drama of the political landscape of her time- the officials might have abused thier power and used her as a distraction in an otherwise defeating world war.

And despite this, history remembers her not on her own terms — as an oriental dancer who used erotic movement in an era where such expression had no place in bourgeois circles, a woman who fled a volatile marriage and carved her own path — but as a villain and a traitor.

One wonders how many other Mata Haris history has simply refused to see.