Orientalizing the Bayadère/Fabricating Mata Hari

Abstract

This article analyzes how photographs of the spy/danseuse Margaretha Zelle fabricated her image of a bayadère or Hindu temple dancer named Mata Hari. Specifically, it looks at how they inflected some key paradigms of orientalia within the orbit of her elaborate pretence while destabilizing her identity when anxieties surrounding World War I were at their peak. A pivotal point of the discussion is the Nataraja, the iconic representation of the Hindu god Shiva dancing the Ananda Tandava or “dance of bliss” deployed to legitimize Zelle's transformation from a middle-class Dutch woman into the infamous Mata Hari, the exotic dancer. Specifically, the article examines how photographs of her debut recital colluded with the intersecting realms of her performance and Hindu iconography, to secure her iconicity. Last but not least, this article analyzes the conflation between the bayadère and Salomé in a studio portrait taken by Walery, a photograph that also cemented Zelle's self-styled identity as Mata Hari. In particular, it looks at how such images embodied her multiple alterities, endowing her with the possibilities of being Mata Hari while becoming the biblical bayadère, and anticipating in turn the violence of her execution in a grotesque reversal of the Salomé myth.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, Michaela Giebelhausen, and Carol Babiracki for their feedback during various stages of writing this article.

Notes

1 “Bayadère” is the French moniker for a devadasi or a Hindu temple dancer. Also used interchangeably with the term “nautch girl” (nautch meaning dance) by English writers, it stems from the Portuguese term, bailadeira meaning a female dancer. Although references to the devadasi can be traced back to the tenth century CE, it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 ballad Der Gott und die Bajadere that inspired the nineteenth-century bayadère of the French ballet and opera (I touch upon this subject later in my article). For more about the bayadère, see Théophile Gautier's reflections (39–40), the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online, Srilata Ravi's discussion of Hindu temple dancers in the French imagination (131–35), Inge Van Rij's more recent analysis of Hector Berlioz's Le Troyens (1–20), and Marian Smith's examination of the 1830 opera, Le Dieu et la Bayadère (22–34).

2 The photographer may have been Paul Boyer.

3 To this end, her images are valuable ciphers of her changing corporealities and fictions. This is especially significant considering that personal documents written by Zelle are either scarce or inaccessible. While her former employee Anna Lintjens destroyed many of her papers, the French Government is yet to declassify its holdings about Zelle. Among Zelle's biographers, Sam Waagenaar (1965) and Russell Warren Howe (1986) claim to have consulted the French military archives otherwise closed to the public (the documents are expected to be declassified in 2017). The Fries Museum in Leeuwarden (Zelle's birthplace) contains Zelle's scrapbooks transferred by Lintjens to Waagenaar (Waagenaar donated them subsequently to the museum; I am grateful to the museum's curator Evert Kramer for this information). According to Waagenaar, Lintjens destroyed most of Zelle's personal letters and other documents to protect her employer's reputation. A small archive of papers at Harvard University shed some light on Zelle's professional career but they do not focus on her debut recital. Furthermore, the authorship of The Diary of Mata Hari published in several editions from 1967, cannot be authenticated.

4 To my knowledge, this is the only picture of Mata Hari's debut recital to be reversed in this manner. See Figure 3 for a comparison.

5 The Nataraja displayed behind Zelle is still in the Musée Guimet's collection. I am grateful to Dr. Amina Okada, chief curator at the Musée Guimet for identifying this object.

6 Waagenaar speculates that it is unclear as to whether Zelle or Emile Guimet chose the name Mata Hari (38–39).

7 The sculptor Auguste Rodin also invoked the sinuosity of the Shiva Nataraja when he praised it as “voluptueux et lumineux” (Fry 239).

8 Bernhardt also wore the famous Art Nouveau serpentine bracelet designed by Alphonse Mucha and Georges Fouquet for her role as the mythological femme fatale Medea.

9 I borrow the term “realist Orientalisms” from Hollis Clayson's “Henri Regnault's Wartime Orientalism” in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts's Orientalism's Interlocutors (132).

10 Kraut notes that Fuller was also heavily influenced by the aesthetics of the Indian “nautch” (11–12).

11 Despite Wilde's intentions, Bernhardt never performed the role of Salomé.

12 Translation is mine.

13 Translation is mine.

14 The severed head also evokes Marie Antoinette's gruesome execution by guillotine in 1793 whose violence, according to Pierre Saint-Amand and Jennifer Curtiss Gage, demonstrated “the Revolution's attempt to rectify the errant sexuality of the nation” (387).