Marketing coup or paradigm shift? Reflections on the Dutch media interpretations of the 2017 ‘Mata Hari: de mythe en het meisje’

Abstract

Following the major Fries Museum exhibition about Margaretha Zelle MacLeod aka Mata Hari (1876–1917), this article explores how Dutch arts journalism reflected its successful balance of commercial appeal, subject complexity, and contemporary relevance. The curators aimed to balance research with aestheticism to offer a more sympathetic view of this historically controversial subject. This article furthermore investigates how Dutch arts journalists shaped and responded to this new narrative through an analysis of relevant media reviews and reports. The resulting discourse reflected how the Fries Museum’s use of artefacts created a narrative of Mata Hari which could comment on the broader challenges for women in early twentieth century Europe. We argue that the exhibition and its reportage built upon and reflected advances in recent historiography to offer a fresh perspective on Mata Hari. Moreover, the review analysis suggests that the exhibition successfully balanced seemingly paradoxical needs, as set out in its prospectus, through the creation of such nuanced narratives.

Keywords

arts journalism comparative content analysis Netherlands first world war espionage Mata Hari Fries Museum

Introduction

Cultural historians have long argued for the complex relationship between salient phenomena and subsequent generations’ imagined perception of past events. While a range of communicative players participate in this labour of interpretation, museums play a key role, often employing representational strategies that are ‘not ideologically uninflected’ [de Groot, 2009: 238; Hannigan, 1998: 98; Young, 2020: 106]. Not only do museum curators operate within a political context but also ‘at the interface of art and culture, tourism and recreation’ as they strive to balance commercial and pedagogic demands with scholarship and entertainment [van Aalst and Boogaarts, 2002: 196]. Within this nexus, arts or culture journalists are key communicative players tasked with improving public appreciation and aesthetic understanding of these multimodal presentations. [Wahl-Jorgensen 2012, 2013, Chong 2019, op. cit.] Curators share with arts journalists an awareness that these aims may be best achieved through operating in a subjective, emotive mode that nonetheless preserves authenticity and aesthetic appeal [Jaakola in Chong: 437]. Given these considerations, what might the reporting of an individual museum exhibition reveal about this joint project of advancing complex and nuanced interpretations of a well-known historical subject? How might the discourse be characterised by historiographic and aesthetic diversity? Finally, how might such reviews reflect a transforming narrative landscape with an authority above mere discursive construction?

This article considers as a specific case study, the major exhibition Mata Hari: de mythe en het meisje (Mata Hari: the myth and the maiden) held at the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden in 2017. It argues that Dutch arts journalists were key to disseminating the museum’s reinterpretation of the exotic dancer and convicted spy Margaretha Zelle MacLeod aka Mata Hari (1876–1917), based upon new evidence and couched within a humanising narrative. Arts journalists’ reports respected the exhibition’s historiographic elements while engaging with the Fries Museum’s use of dramatic tropes of exoticism and mystery. The curators created an emotionally charged exhibition from documents, photographs, and objects whose provenance could be verified. Core to this humanising portrait was the inclusion of previously unseen letters written by Mata Hari and loaned from Tresoar, the Frisan cultural centre. Among other insights, these private documents detailed her experience of male cultural producers (theatrical agents/artists) demanding sexual favours in exchange for employment in early twentieth century Paris, and her attitudes towards motherhood. These intimate letters enabled curators to present Mata Hari unproblematically as both an erotic and a maternal figure. Details of employment conditions for Mata Hari and other female artists revealed in the exhibition gained contemporary significance as they coincided with the first published allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 [Casert, 2017; Kantor and Twohey, 2017]. This, in turn, enabled arts journalists to operate in a subjective mode that framed Mata Hari’s historic struggles within a breaking news story.

An examination of exhibition reviews and reports reflects how the Fries Museum presented a more sympathetic portrait of Mata Hari while, simultaneously, placing her within a broader context of female lives in early twentieth century Europe. We argue that the arts journalists’ engagement with curatorial aims produced a discernible shift in Dutch attitudes towards Mata Hari’s narrative. Moreover, a review analysis suggests that arts reportage reflected the museum’s success in its stated aim of balancing commercial, historiographic and aesthetic considerations. If we take the tensions for museums generated through what Hannigan describes as ‘edutainment’, where educational and cultural activities become enmeshed [Hannigan, 1998: 98], the first element to be explored is the background concerning the exhibition’s subject: Mata Hari. The second element is the museum’s curatorial methodology in which documents, photographs and objects were chosen to produce displays that combined spectacle, scholarship, and emotive experience. The third element provides a definition of arts journalism, its foregrounding of emotions, and therefore the overlap with the museum’s approach.

Background

Leeuwarden, the place of Mata Hari’s birth in 1876, has had a long and sometimes troubled relationship with this historic subject. The city was, in fact, the site of many painful memories for Margaretha (Gretha) Geertruide Zelle: her father’s bankruptcy, the divorce of her parents, and the death of her mother which all occurred before she reached the age of 15. Married to Colonel Rudolf ‘Johnny’ MacLeod in 1895, the couple had a son, Norman, before leaving the Netherlands for the Dutch East Indies the following year. After the birth of a daughter, Non, and then months later, Norman’s death, the couple returned home and soon after separated. Her 1905 debut at the Guimet Musée in Paris, where Gretha reinvented herself as Mata Hari¹, a ‘Hindoo’ dancer, garnered rave reviews and the attention of wealthy patrons and lovers. Her career, however, was short-lived and at the outbreak of war in 1914, an attempted relaunch in Berlin collapsed as the theatres closed and she returned to the Netherlands. In 1915 she was engaged by the German intelligence services and in 1916, she switched sides to work for the French Deuxième Bureau. German agents discovered her deception and exposed her via a series of telegrams they knew the French could decode. She was arrested in Paris in early 1917, tried by court martial, and executed in October. She has been cited as the only recognisable, although dishonourable, female icon of the First World War in France [Darrow, 2000: 272]. Her brief espionage career modernised the myth of sexualised female agents which has endured in historiography and fiction [Wheelwright, 1992].

The Fries Museum’s early discussions about mounting an exhibition to mark the centenary of Mata Hari’s execution in 2017, acknowledged their subject’s brand appeal and had been in the works for many years [Editorial staff of the Leeuwarder Courant, 2014]. The museum publicly expressed interest in organising such a large-scale exhibition as early as 2014 by its then director Saskia Bak, quoted in an article entitled ‘(Fries Museum, 2017a) will be the year of Mata Hari’ [Editorial staff of the Leeuwarder Courant, 2014]. Serendipitously, Leeuwarden was selected as the European Capital of Culture for 2018, increasing its visibility and international allure while coinciding with the centenary of Mata Hari’s execution on 15 October 2017. The museum soon noted an increase of interest in the subject [Editorial staff of the Leeuwarder Courant, 2014].

However, the museum and local stakeholders first had to confront Mata Hari’s notoriety: her trial and execution had been significant news events in 1917 with Dutch journalists playing a central role in shaping her legacy. Mata Hari’s infamy initially stemmed from her career as a courtesan whose details were exposed during her court martial. Her prosecutor André Mornet described her as ‘the greatest spy of this century’, responsible for the death of 50,000 French soldiers [Waagenaar: 249] while other rumours aroused Dutch government fears of reputational damage. Foreign Minister Jonkheer John Loudon in a 1917 telegram to the Dutch ambassador to Paris, mentions German claims that Mata Hari was Queen Wilhelmina’s lady-in-waiting. Loudon ordered the ambassador to ‘try everything possible, in case the French press also spreads this rumour, to have the newspapers point out that this person had nothing to do with the Queen’s court’ [Wheelwright, 1992: 130]. Mata Hari’s notoriety persisted throughout the century, promoted by popular representations, notably the 1932 Greta Garbo film, as well as stage plays, songs, biographies, and novels, many of which were widely distributed in the Netherlands [Boonstra, 2017: 93].

Arts media coverage reflected that by the 1970s, attitudes had changed. A local committee initially hesitated over funding a Mata Hari statue to mark the centenary of her birth in 1976 [Editorial staff of the Leeuwarder Courant, 2008], and local artist Suus Boschma-Berkout’s bronze figure was finally unveiled at Kelders 33 amid protests [Riemersma, 1996]. After a previous attempt in 1983 local vandals threw the figure into the canal in 1989 and the statue had to be restored [Walthaus, 2017a]. Meanwhile, contemporary newspaper coverage also displays an interest in Mata Hari’s name for “Friesland-promotion” and the commercial possibilities of her image [Terpstra, 1975]. Despite a trend towards more positive press coverage [Heidekamp, 2008], Mata Hari’s local position has remained somewhat controversial [Klaver, 2017].

Museum curatorial methodology

The issue of how the museum might mount an accurate, visitor-friendly exhibition of Mata Hari, given the complexities of her history, overlaps with the second challenge: the museum’s curatorial strategy. The following section will address how the museum addressed the lasting tension between the competing versions of her narrative and created an aesthetic design to facilitate emotive engagement with the newly-sympathetic Mata Hari.

The first step for the museum was to secure the loan of documents, such as surveillance reports, transcripts of her interrogations and evidence from the Service Historique de l’Armeé de la Terre. The Frisan cultural centre’s letters were also a key source. Published in book form in 2016 as Denk niet dat ik slecht ben/Don’t think that I’m Bad: Margaretha Zelle MacLeod before Mata Hari, they included correspondence between ‘Gretha’ and Edward MacLeod, her former husband’s paternal uncle, which ran from September 1902 to April 1904. The details Gretha discloses of her struggle to find employment, her anger towards her estranged husband, and her longing for her child, enabled the curators to create an accurate and compelling exhibition. Gretha chronicles how she left Non in the Netherlands in 1903 for Paris where she applied for posts as a department store ‘mannequin’ [Oldersma, 2016: 55, 103], an artists’ model [73, 103], a lady’s companion, a teacher of German, and of piano [115]. She articulates her stark choices: enter the sex trade – as a courtesan or artist’s model – and lose custody of Non, or live in poverty [Oldersma: 199]. Furthermore, the letters reveal her shame in suffering with syphilis which she contracted through John [Oldersma: 123]. Given Gretha’s circumstances, her transformation from ‘runaway wife’ into a ‘star of dance’ reveals her extraordinary quality; simultaneously a victim of, and a rebel against a patriarchal system. As she writes to Edward in 1903, ‘a woman does not remain submissive forever’ [Oldersma: 91], a sentiment that would be visually expressed in the exhibition through her costumed images as she escapes into fantasy. The letters illuminated significant aspects of her story as well as inspiring and informing the museum’s design.

In addition to these documents, the museum acquired several intimate items which included: the statue of Shiva and fourteen wayang puppets from the Museé Guimet in Paris, as well as a 1916 portrait by Dutch painter Isaac Israëls from the Kröller-Müller Museum [Fries Museum press release 10.8.2017]. But to animate Mata Hari’s story and to facilitate the presentation, the museum engaged the Dutch agency Studio Louter with its multidisciplinary design team. Their method focuses on telling meaningful stories through experience-based exhibitions and installations while heightening visitors’ emotional engagement which, they argue, leads to better retention of the proposed message: ‘We analyse the facts, articulate the meaning and determine the emotion’ [Studio Louter, 2021]. Their design of the veil-projection which provided an avatar of Mata Hari performing her most famous dance won an Avicom Award in the category ‘Creative Exhibition Installation’ [Marketing Tribune, 2018] and the whole exhibition was shortlisted for the prestigious national ‘Exhibition of the Year’ award.

Studio Louter worked to develop the exhibition’s concept and designed the media projections to recreate Mata Hari’s dances (for which there is no existing archive film), in collaboration with Amsterdam’s creative design agency OPERA. Studio Louter aimed to enable visitors to feel ‘closer to Mata Hari than ever before’, letting them sympathize (‘meeleven’) with ‘the girl behind the myth’ [Studio Louter, 2017]. A sympathetic contemporary narrative would attract a new kind of visitor, so the old paradigm of Mata Hari as an exotic but morally dubious figure (associated with divorce, sexual liberty, and German espionage), required a reformulation. In addition to producing a visually appealing exhibit and to acquiring artefacts, the museum ran a marketing campaign that garnered international attention. To promote the exhibition, subject experts gave many broadcast interviews and published an analysis of the Tresoar letters in The Guardian in December 2016 raising public awareness of its plans [Wheelwright, 2016]. The article, and a subsequent piece in the online magazine Aeon [Wheelwright, 2017], further developed these new insights, stimulated potential visitor interest, and promoted the museum’s profile [Bies, 2017; Boonstra, 2017; Kuiper, 2017].

The final result was Mata Hari: de mythe en het meisje (Mata Hari: the myth and the maiden), which ran from 14 October 2017 to 2 April 2018, receiving widespread national and international attention. It welcomed 92,781 visitors, making it ‘one of the most successful exhibitions in the history of the museum’ [Editorial staff of Dagblad van het Noorden, 2018].²

Arts journalists as key media players

The third element in the background to the exhibition’s dissemination of a changed paradigm was the role of the specialist arts journalists as key media players. Newspapers tell us a great deal about the ways in which historical events and figures are discussed, interpreted, and appreciated in their time: these institutions help give shape to how readers make sense of their world. This renders newspaper reports particularly suitable for a study that aims to uncover how the exhibition was perceived, to paraphrase historian Roger Chartier, as a representation of the social world itself and a constituent of social reality [Chartier, 1982: 30; Vella, 2009: 192]. We take ‘arts journalism’ as a subset of ‘normal’ journalistic practice specialising in the arts and entertainment [Chong: 433]. Their specialist reports and reviews operate in a subjective mode, defined by Wahl-Jorgensen as ‘a deeply embedded tool of the journalistic profession’ with the qualities of bias, emotion, and self-interest, and in which the ‘right and wrong ways’ to incorporate emotions are understood. The ideal arts journalist tasked with covering a museum exhibition, for example, would be more extensively qualified than a conventional news reporter and understand the responsibility of communicating the transformative nature of the arts [Harries and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2007: 619]. Moreover, the arts journalist uses emotionality and subjectivity as rhetorical devices in their project of improving public appreciation of the arts [Harries and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2007: 619].

Given the arts journalists’ license to operate in a subjective, emotive mode, their professional task overlapped with those of Studio Louter’s in promoting the museum’s new narrative about Mata Hari. Before moving on to our analysis of the exhibition’s media coverage, it is important to first further delineate its evolution. Prior to the exhibition, the museum detailed the exhibition concept and design in a prospectus and following Studio Louter’s ‘Emotion Design Method’, it identified two separate narratives. The first, the objective narrative, would follow her story from her childhood in Friesland to her execution. The second narrative would be subjective and refer to how the story would be told. The overarching goal of the narratives, from complementary angles, would humanise Mata Hari, offering a compassionate view which can be distilled from the Studio Louter’s text:

(a) Sympathy through familiarity

By focussing on the familiar biographical details of Mata Hari’s story, the museum invited visitors to better understand her underlying motives, whilst also allowing them to feel intimate with her. The inclusion of motherhood as an expanded category became key to generating empathy: the price Gretha paid to escape her oppressive marriage was losing her daughter. Until the Tresoar letters were published, there was little archival information on Mata Hari’s role as a mother aside from Sam Waagenaar’s 1995 biography in which he detailed her attempted reunions with Non [Waagenaar: 93–95, 123–125]. The gaps about her maternal role were variously filled by: a film, La Fille de Mata Hari [Saint-Laurent, 1954], with imaginative re-enactments, a graphic novel series La Javanaise [Debois and Cyrus, 2013, 2014], and a novel by Geertje Gort, Het parfum van Mata Hari [Gort, 2007], which explored Non’s perspective.

To supplement revelations in the Tresoar letters, the museum curators acquired objects such as a ‘little one’s’ album, baby rattles, and a tea set and linens, enabling visitors to imagine Gretha as a young mother. But given the previous lack of documentation on this subject, especially from Gretha herself, popular representations emphasised her lack of domestic qualities as a necessary contrast to her imagine as a seductive spy [Darrrow, 2000; Wheelwright, 1992]. The Tresoar letters therefore frame Gretha’s sense of powerlessness, as she writes, ‘Whatever I do, I am besmirched. I have lost everything regardless’ [Oldersma: 199]. This is a more nuanced and less ideological portrait of a woman who rejects motherhood from fear of poverty, which breaks her last link with bourgeois morality; as she writes from Paris in 1904, ‘I still don’t have Non, and I no longer care for the rest’ [Oldersma: 199]. Rather than forsaking her daughter to seek fame and fortune on the stage, Gretha realised that work as an artist’s model, courtesan or performer would further damage her reputation: these pursuits were simply incompatible with motherhood.

Furthermore, the museum exhibition underlined Gretha’s relationship to Leeuwarden itself by dedicating a light, pink room to her youth there. (Frisians constitute one of the museum’s three main target groups.) From there, the mood darkens as she moves from the rosy glow of early childhood through various losses, before rising to fame, and then descending into infamy.

(b) Sympathy through adversity³

By emphasising the dramatic events of Gretha’s life, the museum invited the visitor to feel compassion and admiration for a complex individual. The exhibition cleverly refocussed attention, through its acquisition of exhibition items, on her early life with its personal tragedy. For example, the Studio Louter website explains that the exhibition was

set up like a movie. Each room is a scene from the life story of Margaretha Zelle.

The story begins with a flashback – the interrogations by the French detective […] that led to her execution and culminates when the visitor sees Margaretha dance as Mata Hari through the main hall of the museum. [2017]

With this focus on hardship, Mata Hari was thus presented as a victim who fought against her fate. The movie-like set up emphasised this dramatic tone, with the dark colors used for events such as the family’s bankruptcy, contrasting with the lighter room about her younger years in Friesland (Figure 1). Studio Louter’s approach of sensory integration such as audio of voices, music as well as natural sounds, created an effect that put the visitor, quite literally, in Mata Hari’s shoes. Moreover, the percentage of exhibition space devoted to young Gretha’s happy, early childhood, only one third of the ‘Jeugd’ (youth) room, reflects her lived experience. This brief interlude was followed by four tragedies; her father’s bankruptcy, her parents’ divorce, her mother’s death, ‘failing’ the ‘kweekschool’, before marriage appears to offer a new start. Later, the space occupied by her ‘Scheiding’ (divorce) reflects its negative impact on her life during her final decade.

Figure 1.

[Studio Louter 2020].

The Tresoar letters are key elements in presenting this narrative. Back in the 1990s, for example, little was known about Mata Hari’s inner life: ‘She had no close friends and did not keep a diary’, a museum curator told the Algemeen Dagblad [1997: 1, 6]. He continued,

we do not know how she reacted to the death of her son […]. We do not know if she missed her daughter Non, who stayed with her husband after the divorce. And did she enjoy sharing the bed with all these men, or was it a means of livelihood that she felt rather indifferent about?

The recovered letters which feature Mata Hari’s reflections therefore helped the museum to humanize her through a more compassionate representation. Simultaneously, they allowed visitors to access anger and sadness, which worked perfectly with Studio Louter’s method. Moreover, the museum was agnostic on Mata Hari’s guilt as a spy arguing that she merited sympathy, regardless. By conveying a sense of intimacy – even the museum’s objective narrative was illustrated by personal objects – and employing a variety of emotions, they decreased the distance between the visitor and Mata Hari.

Hoping to attract potential visitors by tapping into their limited contextual information and older stereotypes about Mata Hari’s story, commercials were uploaded onto YouTube using dramatic tropes of exoticism and mystery, with voice-overs such as: ‘This is her wedding photo. 10 years later, she was a femme fatale. What happened?’ [Fries Museum, 2017b]. The exhibition itself, then, displayed both the familiar and the tragic, adversarial events and themes, but did their humanising message come across?

Methodology

Although the Mata Hari exhibition received global coverage, we chose to focus on the Dutch press because Mata Hari has historically generated more news coverage in the Netherlands than abroad. With direct evidence of visitor’s attitudes towards Mata Hari before and after their visit being unavailable [van der Hoek, Head of Marketing and Communication of the Fries Museum, 2020], newspaper reports suggest an alternative, but appropriate medium through which to gauge a shift in attitudes. Therefore, two large digital databases – Lexis Nexis and De Krant van Toen – were consulted in the fall of 2020 to retrieve all coverage on the exhibition’s run between October 2017 and April 2018. The search words ‘mata hari’ and ‘tentoonstelling’ (exhibition) were used together to refine and narrow down relevant results. These were then manually scanned to identify all articles that operated in a subjective mode and were explicitly listed as either reviews or columns written by (arts) journalists. Interviews with curators in which expressed opinions could only be attributed to a museum employee, were excluded. This led to 11 articles in total.

Previous research

Although large-scale attempts to study the media representation of Mata Hari in newspapers remain limited, two studies have examined her Dutch press coverage as a chronological overview of her characterization as a historical figure.

In 2008, Heidekamp analysed Mata Hari’s press coverage from four daily newspapers between 1917 and 2007 from a gender-perspective by studying the collective memory of Mata Hari as a lieux de mémoire [Nora, 1998]. She noted four recurring representations, which varied from ‘the sly spy’ to ‘the headstrong and emancipated pioneer’ but did not identify being a ‘mother’ as a separate category. Heidekamp concluded that the press had slowly transitioned from integrating a predominately negative to an overall more positive image of womanhood but stressed that the extent to which this change had taken place differed substantially depending upon the newspaper [79].

Similarly, Tjepkema [2016] examined the newspaper representation of Mata Hari in relation to her regional and national characterization, as part of a larger study of Mata Hari’s image in academic research, movies, photographs and novels between 1880 and 2016 through a character analysis. Although motherhood and femininity were included, it was so broadly defined that the data cannot be used to inform this study’s methodology. It is worthwhile noting, however, that according to Tjepkema Mata Hari ‘was not mentioned in newspapers […] as a mother’ during her lifetime: ‘Only years later the gender perspective and the role of motherhood [were] discussed in news articles’ [29].

Heidekamps’ detailed overview of Mata Hari press coverage in four major newspapers (both national and regional) between 1917–2007, however, offers grounds for a descriptive comparative content analysis [Vella: 198–200] that addresses the overall tone and (the amount of) attention dedicated to the museum’s two complementary angles through the identification of the reviewer’s or columnist’s presented arguments and overall appreciation of the museum’s proposed narrative through subjective personal statements. This, in turn, allows for a determination of the extent to which the Fries Museum’s elements of familiarity and adversity were adopted.

Analysis

De Telegraaf

According to Heidekamp [2008], the popular daily newspaper De Telegraaf regularly published articles about Mata Hari between 1917 and 2007 [51]. The 1950s and 1960s constituted an important turning point in its overall tone as the newspaper slowly shifted towards a new portrayal of Mata Hari: that of an ‘innocent victim’ and an ‘unsuspecting girl’, who was an ‘easy prey for men’ [53]. Her victimhood was further reinforced by the fact that the newspaper never blamed her for her own fate [57].

Unsurprisingly, years later, the newspaper gave the new exhibition an extensive review (997 words), contextualised with biographical detail [2017: 12]. An interview with curator Hans Groeneweg articulated the new narrative that, despite often being depicted as coldhearted, Mata Hari ‘was also a loving mother’. This subjective, sympathizing narrative also shines through in discussion of the exhibited handwritten letters which, according to the journalist, demonstrate Mata Hari’s anguish in leaving Non. While these observations reinforce the newspaper’s previous image of her victimhood, the writer acknowledges Mata Hari’s ‘dramatic life’, echoing the museum’s focus on adversity. Her marriage to John is interpreted as a logical consequence of her youthful family problems and her relocation to Paris as a sheer necessity. Such comments reinforce both compassion and victimhood, albeit a victim with courage.

Yet, the newspaper demonstrates a great awareness of the competing narratives in films and books about Mata Hari, i.e. the broad spectrum of media representations. Moreover, the journalist calls out Mata Hari’s ‘fatal’ character flaws, such as her ‘vanity and financial greediness’, and her contradictory persona. De Telegraaf’s review, entitled ‘Mata Hari’s fatal game with the truth’, stresses this critical undertone. Although this constitutes a departure from its previous narrative, in a larger sense it supports the museum’s underlying goal of disseminating a more nuanced and complex story.

Although Mata Hari’s ties to Leeuwarden remain unexplored – she ‘was never a down-to-earth female Frisian’ – the journalist concludes that her roles as mother, girl, and fallen woman preserve the existing myth, and the museum’s intentions.

NRC Handelsblad

Liberal daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad displayed a ‘moderate interest’ in Mata Hari’s life and, over the years, offered a ‘diversity of interpretations’ [63]. In fact, Heidekamp argues that Mata Hari’s image was highly variable between 1992 and 2007, leaving its readers to form their own opinions [63–64]. NRC Handelsblad, like De Telegraaf, regularly focussed on Mata Hari’s human characteristics and as an emancipated pioneer, its coverage also allowed for different interpretations [62]. Although such variability avoids a definitive narrative, the journalist who wrote the exhibition review (768 words) explicitly discusses and adopts the museum’s formulated objectives [Verduijn, 2017].

Furthermore, Mata Hari’s regional identity is reinforced, as she is presented as the ‘lost daughter’ of Friesland, finally embraced by the region that she is originally from [2017, 2]. The tone of the remaining text is openly empathetic. The journalist argues that the exhibition offers a deep understanding of Mata Hari, making her life and motives invoelbaar (‘palpable’) to visitors: it ‘let[s] you feel for Zelle’s fear of death, her longing for her child and her fight for independence. For the girl behind the myth.’ Instead of emphasising previous narratives, the journalist shifts attention towards Mata Hari as a mother and her ‘love for motherhood’. The writer even deems the objects related to motherhood the ‘most impressive’. Again, Mata Hari’s work in Paris is presented as an unfair choice: she would have rather stayed with ‘Nonnie’, a sentiment which supports the museum’s representation of her as a victim, regardless of her espionage activities.

Friesch Dagblad

Regional and Christian newspaper Friesch Dagblad wrote infrequently about Mata Hari and the overall tone of its coverage is impersonal, matter-of-fact and even sceptical [Heidekamp, 2008: 68, 75, 80]. When the language of other newspapers had began to favor Mata Hari in the 1960s and 1970s, Friesch Dagblad still saw her ‘as an immoral woman that, due to her promiscuous, unchristian lifestyle, did not deserve an excessive amount of attention’ [68–69].

That image has somewhat changed now, because, as the begging letters to Edward MacLeod demonstrate, the ‘tragedy is clear as day’ [Andringa, 2017: 6]. Although the incident with principal Haanstra is presented as a ‘sexual escapade’ and the text perpetuates older narratives (ie. the femme fatale), the descriptions of her marriage, for example, evoke sympathy and Mata Hari’s work as a ‘prostitute’, according to the newspaper, was motivated by poverty. Similarly to the review in De Telegraaf, curator Yves Rocourt, is interviewed to explain the museum’s nuanced vision. Mata Hari is characterised as ‘a mother’ who left Non behind for her well-being, a humanising view underlined by a discussion of the Tresoar letters.

The overall image while not entirely positive is much less negative and more sympathetic compared to its previous coverage, as Heidekamp demonstrates. Moreover, the journalist seems aware that the museum wants to present a more nuanced representation of Mata Hari, without tarnishing the myth, and leave the reader to determine whether or not she was guilty of espionage against France. The visitor is allowed to be the detective: ‘Draw your conclusions!’

Leeuwarder Courant

Regional newspaper the Leeuwarder Courant, in contrast, has written much more prominently, extensively and positively about Mata Hari, especially from 1954 onwards. The newspaper, for example, has always taken either a neutral position or explicitly claimed that Mata Hari was innocent of espionage, with the exception of a 1932 theatre review [Heidekamp, 2008: 70]. In addition, Heidekamp observed a strong interest in the years that Mata Hari spent in Friesland: the newspaper regularly wrote about her regional connections and identity, praising her admirable ‘Frisian’ qualities, like her perseverance and her determination [75–76, 80].

The review (849 words) begins by highlighting the fact that the exhibition shows Mata Hari mostly as a victim, as the museum intended [van Santen, 2017]. The design of the rooms, set up as an ‘adventure novel’ by Studio Louter [2017: 4], helps to draw visitors closer to Mata Hari, the journalist argues. The arts journalist observes that the exhibition provides no real answers about her guilt – as the museum had planned – but does immerse visitors in the dramatic life of a historical figure. The tone of the conclusion is surprisingly critical as Mata Hari is represented earlier in the text as ‘a woman who was perhaps less of a victim than this rendition of her life makes you suspect’. This results in a more nuanced representation when compared to the newspaper’s strictly positive narrative of the past.

Although the newspaper had been ambiguous on whether or not Wybrandus Haanstra abused Mata Hari [Heidekamp: 71] and still gives no definitive answer, the #MeToo movement gave Mata Hari’s story a topical relevance. In a short opinion piece (279 words), the newspaper’s columnist, journalist Asing Walthaus, connects the incident to developments concerning Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein [Walthaus, 2017c]. The piece does not make Mata Hari into a victim, but claims that the Haanstra incident, and the topic of sex in general, should have been a much larger part of the exhibition. Her representation in Mata Hari: de mythe en het meisje is too decent, he argues: it’s made family-safe and lacks the tension that was visible in her life. She was possibly abused, but later on used her sexuality to her benefit. In fact, this comment reflects the broader tensions discussed earlier in balancing the need to mount an exhibition which can include as wide an audience as possible – including a family-friendly one – with the messiness of historical evidence.

Other reviews

In its review of the exhibition, financial daily newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad writes about Mata Hari with a rather nuanced tone [Kloosterboer, 2018]. Whereas other newspapers picked up on the dramatic events of her youth, the FD describes them factually, without judgement or pity. This is probably because the journalist demonstrates a great awareness of previous, one-sided narratives: during the process of becoming a legend, Mata Hari’s story has become blurred, she argues. Understanding Mata Hari as a character, she continues, heavily depends on the dynamics of the historical context in which she was discussed. This insight is probably why the journalist never openly victimises Mata Hari nor expresses admiration for her: she knows that everyone is always trying to project something onto Mata Hari, and onto her story.

The journalist not only explicitly acknowledges Mata Hari’s personal agency, but also refers to the agency of her male lovers and friends. Instead of solely attributing her international success to her appearance, she also credits her character. Similarly, the reviewer situates the question of ‘Where did things go wrong?’ at the beginning of the First World War, rather than earlier in Mata Hari’s life. ‘Innocent,’ the journalist concludes, ‘she was certainly not, but the proof against her was paper-thin.’ This represents Mata Hari’s story in a much more subtle, nuanced way, rather than an echo of the museum’s narrative, when compared to much of the previous press coverage. There is no mention of the Tresoar letters.

A local columnist of the Oirschots Weekjournaal, a free (“huis-aan-huis”) newspaper from the south of the Netherlands, calls the exhibition ‘spectacular and overwhelming’ [van Ginniken, 2017]. It confirms the museum’s assumption that many people vaguely knew who Mata Hari was but were unfamiliar with the entire story. Although he acknowledges the established femme fatale narrative, the text also carries an admiring undertone as he calls her a ‘Frisian legend’ and briefly discusses how a ‘“normal” girl from Leeuwarden’ became a superstar. It hints at the exhibition’s emphasis on adversity and its emotional approach, by mentioning the ‘disastrous consequences’ of her parents’ Adam and Antje’s divorce. Moreover, the columnist states that ‘Greetje grabs you by the throat’.

The Christian daily newspaper Nederlands Dagblad, uses ‘religion’ as its theme, asking throughout the article: ‘What did Mata Hari believe?’ When compared to previous coverage of Friesch Dagblad, a newspaper with the same religious signature, it appears as surprisingly nuanced:

The exhibition sheds a new light on a woman who has always been painted in glaring colors, either as a traitress out for sex or as an early champion of feminism. Mata Hari was neither. [Veenhof, 2017]

The journalist credits the exhibition with being both meaningful and topical and references the #MeToo movement when discussing the hostile tone of the French court documents. Similarly, it notes that she rather than principal Haanstra left the school following the alleged incident. Extensive attention is dedicated to the displayed items related to motherhood, which are deemed fascinating, intriguing, and touching.

Furthermore, she is represented as ‘politically naïve’, rather than pitiful: Mata Hari was ‘not a victim’. Yet, the dramatic aspects of her life are explicitly addressed: she made contact with John, her soon-to-be husband, simply ‘out of desperation’. Thus, without completely victimizing her, the newspaper offers a more sympathetic angle, acknowledging both her financial struggles and failed efforts to be reunited with her daughter.

Although the daily newspaper De Volkskrant was only moderately enthusiastic about the exhibition, their reviewer did credit the museum with animating Mata Hari: her life and character were made ‘palpable’, partly because of the display of ‘desperate letters to her father’. Mata Hari herself, however, remains ‘a woman with many faces’.

Reformatorisch Dagblad, which follows the belief system of the Reformed church, presents a very different image of Mata Hari in their review [Leeflang, 2017]. It calls the exhibition ‘honest’ but ‘shocking’, claiming she ‘was out after money and officers’ and qualified as a sinner. The journalist cannot decide whether the sin was her involvement in espionage or her sexual contacts with many different officers. The review describes her life in chronological order, in a rather sober tone and very matter-of-factly with events contextualised by quotes from a curator. Although the review’s overall representation is somewhat negative, it provides nuance with quotes from someone who worked on the exhibition: ‘She was a housewife and a caring mother for her children.’

The review of the daily newspaper Trouw may also qualify as nuanced [de Wolf, 2017]. The journalist criticizes the use of the word ‘maiden’ since Mata Hari was 41 years old when she died and a ‘high-spirited, charming woman’, not a ‘little girl’. This strengthens her sense of agency.

However, the reviewer dismisses the museum’s claim that ‘her love for adventure, flirting and beautiful stories became fatal to her’, noting that Captain Bouchardon, the lead investigator, had judged her before his interrogations had even begun. In addition, the writer mentions that ‘Trouw [had] already reported on the documents that proved that Zelle had mostly become a play-thing for the French court-martial.’

Although Mata Hari is not presented as a victim, the review’s overall tone, especially towards the end, is relatively sympathetic: the journalist addresses the story’s ‘painful background’ and draws attention to the handwritten letters as items ‘that perhaps impress the most’.

Conclusion

This article established the Fries Museum’s formidable challenges in designing an exhibition about Margaretha Zelle MacLeod aka Mata Hari that advanced a complex and nuanced interpretation. We have identified how the museum’s curatorial decisions led to greater aesthetic diversity and how subsequent arts reporting transformed the discursive landscape.

The difficulties of this more modern approach are neatly summarised by a local journalist:

For some people she is a classic femme fatale. For others she was a woman trying not to succumb to difficult circumstances or she was a victim of cynical men’s politics. For the Fries Museum, she is all of that at the same time and has to be a crowd-puller as well. [Walthaus, 2017b]

The museum’s subjective narrative was driven by a compassionate approach which focused on the dramatic aspects of Mata Hari’s life, and which set aside her guilt or innocence as a spy by excluding certain documentary evidence. Yet, the museum’s curators, in interviews with journalists from De Telegraaf and Friesch Dagblad, expressed their intention to bring more nuance to Mata Hari’s story. Their success in achieving this goal is reflected in the exhibition’s coverage by arts journalists whose practice allows for emotional and subjective reflections. Moreover, their reviews and features signalled a shift in media representation of Mata Hari.

Journalists whose publications previously represented Mata Hari uncritically [Heidekamp, 2008], now also integrated her less flattering characteristics (De Telegraaf) or questioned her innocence (Leeuwarder Courant), resulting in a more complex representation of her persona.

Publications that were more reluctant to discuss Mata Hari in the past, however, wrote extensively and more positively about this historical figure. NRC Handelsblad adopted the museum’s new narrative almost word for word. Friesch Dagblad, which had previously deemed Mata Hari an unworthy or uninteresting topic, now addressed the tragic events of her life, even mentioning her maternal role, by referring to the Tresoar letters which ‘show[ed] a very human side’ [Andringa, 2017]. Because Heidekamps’ research only addressed four major publications, our comparative analysis here is limited and yet the shift in tone is striking.

Additional coverage also suggested greater nuance: although Mata Hari is not always represented as the victim that the museum intended, arts journalists often acknowledged the tragedy in her life. Moreover, the Tresoar letters, credited with making her motives more visible and ‘palpable’, were regularly mentioned as insightful objects that generated sympathy.

While other newspapers with a religious signature often wrote positively about Mata Hari and one even mentioned the breaking #MeToo stories, the more conservative Reformatorisch Dagblad seems to be an exception. However, even they suggested another perspective with a quote from an exhibition curator.

Areas for further research might include an examination of whether this general trend could be observed in other arts coverage, such as background articles that chronicle her life or which discuss Mata Hari’s media representations. Future investigations might include whether this generally nuanced (and even more positive) tone will endure or whether Mata Hari will, once again, shift her shape.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Julie Wheelwright

Notes

Author biographies

Dr Julie Wheelwright is a subject specialist on women in espionage and author of several historical monographs, most recently Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey 2020). She is currently course tutor on the MSt Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and an honorary research fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London.

Adriënne Ummels (1996) holds a bachelor’s degree in French Language and Culture and received her master’s degree in Literary Studies (research) from the interdisciplinary HLCS program at Radboud University, the Netherlands, where she focused on European literary journalism. She was an intern at research center RIRRA 21 (Paul Valéry University of Montpellier, France) in 2018.

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