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Her mother was a kind and long-suffering mother who essentially worked herself to death after business reverses led her husband to abandon the family. Her father was a prosperous hatter who appears to have doted upon and indulged his only daughter. Her Bouchardon, like the actual attorney, bites his nails to the quick, for example.)įrom her earliest years, the girl who became Mata Hari seems to have lived a life dominated by loss and two deeply empowering realizations - that the normal rules of risk and reward might not apply to her (that she could, indeed, cheat death) and that the sexuality she seems to have enjoyed from an early age could be a source of power and a tool of survival. (The liberties Murphy has taken in her reimagining of Margaretha’s inner life are all the more credible for her close study of the details surrounding the historical Mata Hari’s case. Her audience is her prosecutor/interrogator, Bouchardon, and the nuns charged with caring for her in solitary confinement.
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Thus, in Murphy’s artful hands, the story of Margaretha’s life emerges as a series of anecdotal tales, reveries and reflections, delivered Scheherazade-like, as Margaretha - dolefully imprisoned and awaiting execution - attempts to seduce the authorities into clemency. Over and above the incriminating circumstances cataloged by her accusers, she is utterly convinced of her innocence not only by the exculpatory force of her own explanations but also by the fact that she had, since girlhood, “cheated death.” The Mata Hari - or Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, as she legally was known - who speaks from the pages of Yannick Murphy’s layered, unself-consciously sensual and achingly beautiful third novel, “Signed, Mata Hari,” is her own best advocate. It may say something of other, more intimate subversions of the inherited order that although the great treacheries of the last 100 years almost invariably were worked by men, the archetypal spy who springs most readily to mind is a woman - Mata Hari, the Dutch-born exotic dancer, whom the French executed at Vincennes in 1917 because they believed she was a German double agent. While the 19th century made a “great game” of the imperial powers’ secret struggles with one another, it remained for the 20th to transform espionage into a separate sphere of human existence, a parallel world governed by an aesthetic of betrayal.