Violent Femmes

Women as Spies in Popular Culture

Rosie White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415370776
• eBook ISBN: 9781134198061
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The female spy has long exerted a strong grip on the popular imagination. With reference to popular fiction, film and television Violent Femmes examines the figure of the female spy as a nexus of contradictory ideas about femininity, power, sexuality and national identity. Fictional representations of women as spies have recurrently traced the dynamic of women's changing roles in British and American culture. Employing the central trope of women who work as spies, Rosie White examines cultural shifts during the twentieth century regarding the role of women in the professional workplace.

Violent Femmes examines the female spy as a figure in popular discourse which simultaneously conforms to cultural stereotypes and raises questions about women's roles in British and American culture, in terms of gender, sexuality and national identity.

Immensely useful for a wide range of courses such as film and television studies, English, cultural studies, women's studies, gender studies, media studies, communications and history, this book will appeal to students from undergraduate level upwards.

1 Spies, lies and sexual outlaws

Male spies in popular fiction

This chapter examines the male spy in twentieth-century British popular fiction. While this may appear to reinforce the cultural authority of masculinity, proposing the male spy as origin and the female spy as his pale imitation, that is not my intention. The purpose of this approach is, rather, to trace contradictions and absences within literary representations of masculinity, following the growing body of work which bears witness to its social and historical specificity (see Mangan and Walvin 1987, Roper and Tosh 1991, Rutherford 1997, Boyd 2003). To this end, the discussion centres on four influential fictional spies: the Scarlet Pimpernel, Richard Hannay, James Bond and Alec Leamas. These characters mark shifts in literary accounts of espionage, from the ‘great game’ to a more muddied world. They also map an eccentric history of modern England from 1900 to the 1960s. This was a foundational period for the mythology of the spy. British fictions established a template against which later spies in fact and fiction are measured; yet, these figures are shaky constructs, embodying fantasies of monolithic power and agency while barely suppressing the Others they allegedly oppose. This chapter thus examines four male spies in the light of so-called ‘queer’ theory, which argues that dominant social norms are predicated upon subordinated categories (see Butler 1990, Sedgewick 1991). Fragmentation, foreignness and femininity haunt these heroes, yet they also depend upon these opposing forces. Male spies in fiction consequently initiate debate about spies in the early twentieth century, while the femmes fatales and good women who inhabit the margins of their narratives call attention to the mutability of masculinity and to contemporary debates about the role of women in public life.

At the turn of the twentieth century, English masculinity was understood as white, middle-class and heterosexual (Rutherford 1997). The Victorian and Edwardian cult of ‘manliness’ may have been established in Britain through the public-school system, but was exported to the USA as part of a new fascination with physical and mental health (Park 1987). Contrary to such ideals of nobility, Christianity and honour, the male spy is required by his profession to acquire skills that are antithetical to his national and gender identities. In particular, the spy is required to develop criminal attributes, to deceive others and disguise himself to evade capture or to gain information. Such masquerades run counter to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of white masculinity, as they employ characteristics more often projected onto a deviant other. Despite his role as a heroic protagonist, the male spy is thus shadowed by deviance; to spy is to be devious, after all. In effect, the male spy must acquire skills that are stereotypically and pejoratively ascribed not only to criminality but also to femininity – he must be sneaky, double-faced and underhand. In early spy fictions, such as Buchan’s Hannay novels, these skills are primarily evident in his foreign foes; hence, femininity and the foreign threat to England’s nationhood are frequently elided (Hiley 1990: 73). This trope is depicted variously in the work of key authors who have helped shape popular understandings of espionage, from Buchan to Fleming and le Carré, as they refract the concerns and contexts of their particular moments.¹ As the twentieth century advances, fictions about the English spy present a gentleman whose profession works against any gentlemanly mode of conduct.

The aristocratic spy: Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

In her essay on spies in nineteenth-century American popular fiction, Christine Bold notes how authors ‘masculinized the ‘‘great game,’’ allied espionage with the frontier myth to discover heroic characteristics for the spy, and used the figure to make sense of a social order undergoing rapid change’ (Bold 1990: 18). Although the frontier spirit is specific to an American context, the difficulty of ascribing a properly heroic character to a spy protagonist is a problem common to all spy fiction. Many representations of the spy compensate for this by emphasising the pleasure he takes in adventure, moral standpoint and appropriate resolution, yet such emphases also serve to highlight the contradictory nature of the spy’s role. While spy protagonists may represent attempts to ‘make sense of a social order undergoing rapid change’ during the twentieth century, they also indicate absences and inconsistencies in the ideologies that shape such social orders. Male spies are thus hegemonic characters, as they serve the dominant order and question it. One such contradictory figure appears in an early twentiethcentury popular novel which struggles even to achieve classification as spy fiction: the Scarlet Pimpernel. If William Le Queux wrote spy novels that veered into the genre of the ‘love-romance’, Baroness Orczy’s most famous creation is lodged in the romantic genre and often only considered spy fiction on sufferance (McCormick 1977: 147, Panek 1981: 5–16). The Scarlet Pimpernel was initially rejected by at least a dozen publishers. Orczy and her husband, undaunted, made the manuscript into a play, which was performed to great success in Nottingham in 1903; the novel was subsequently published in 1905 (McCormick 1977: 147–8, Staples 1988: 232–3). The main character, Sir Percy Blakeney, survived for several more novels and inspired a number of film and television adaptations. The most successful film version, which is largely faithful to Orczy’s novel, is Harold Young’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) starring Leslie Howard.

Set during the French Revolution, The Scarlet Pimpernel recounts the adventures of a French actress, Marguerite St Just, married to Sir Percy Blakeney and unaware of her husband’s secret identity as the Scarlet Pimpernel, mysterious liberator of the French nobility. The narrative follows a romantic trajectory, as the estranged husband and wife are unwittingly united against Chauvelin, the devious republican spy, and ultimately restored to marital union. At the beginning of the novel, they have been married for a year but were separated twenty-four hours after their wedding by Marguerite’s inadvertent betrayal of the Marquis de St Cyr and his subsequent execution. All the major characters are secret agents; Percy Blakeney as the leader of an amateur English spy ring, Chauvelin as professional spy for Revolutionary France and Marguerite who, with her history of betrayal, is forced by Chauvelin to betray the Pimpernel in order to save her brother, Armand. The distinction between the heroic Blakeney and the villainous Chauvelin is made clear throughout; their opposition endorses the innate dominance of the ‘natural’ aristocrat over the common man. Yet Blakeney constitutes a mercurial hero whose skills in disguise and dissimulation are preternatural. Part of Blakeney’s ‘cover’ is his role as a foppish nobleman. Sir Percy is a distinctive character in English high society, obsessed with the minutiae of fashion and leisure, yet able to disguise himself with ease on the other side of the Channel. He first appears in the novel as an old woman driving a cartload of concealed aristocrats through the gates of Paris; in the final adventure of the novel, he is back on French soil and disguised as a Jew. The Pimpernel thus cross-dresses in terms of gender, class and race, confirming his reputedly magical ability to evade capture. His performances also compromise his identity as an Englishman, however; if he is such a skilled actor, then the ‘true’ identity of Percy Blakeney may also be a disguise. This early example of the spy as romantic hero reveals the contradictions upon which British spy fiction rests. Blakeney’s aristocratic birth, thirst for adventure and omniscient leadership make him a typical fin-de-siècle protagonist. Kelly Boyd argues that the function of such heroes in Victorian boys’ magazines was to ‘crystallise the link between masculinity and class status . . . at a time when the category was undergoing refinement, especially for the middle classes’ (Boyd 2003: 47). Blakeney fits this model but also problematises it through his theatrical use of disguise. While his exploits conform to those of a Boys’ Own hero, the means by which he achieves his successes do not.

In Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, Michael Denning describes how the spy thriller is formally constructed in terms of a game, with its own rules and set players:

Moreover, this concern for games is founded historically in the ethic of sportsmanship of the public schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, an ethic that was disseminated and popularised by the ‘school stories’ of popular boys’ weeklies, by a variety of popular fiction forms including the thriller, and by youth organisations like the Boy Scouts. The myth of the Newbolt man with his mystical loyalty to school, nation and Empire, and his philistine muscular Christianity, set the tone for the early thrillers of Childers, Buchan and Sapper. It was an ethic that took the school cricket pitch, the celebrated playing fields of Eton, as a figure for social life, thus combining an institutional loyalty and reverence for hierarchical structures with a sense that social and political conflict was a game, to be played in a spirit of fairness, amateurism, and manliness.

(Denning 1987: 33)

The novel’s account of Blakeney’s fairness and amateurism is aligned with his social role as an English aristocrat, but his manliness is compromised both by his foppish masquerade in London society and by his disguises in France. The reader sees little of the ‘real’ Blakeney or his manliness, as that is his secret identity as the Scarlet Pimpernel. While The Scarlet Pimpernel is a historical novel, it is a fiction that engages with concerns regarding national identity and gender at the turn of the twentieth century. Blakeney’s heroic deeds make him a Boys’ Own hero, but the ease with which he becomes the dandy feminises him. The setting of the novel places Blakeney as a contemporary of Beau Brummel, the nineteenth-century dandy, but its publication in 1905 places the narrative in the wake of a fin-de-siècle decadence that gave the dandy a new significance. The aesthete’s obsessive interest in clothing and decor aligned him with women’s role as consumers in the new department stores and thus made him a rare and exotic creature; the ‘feminized male’ (Felski 1995: 91–7).

Blakeney’s ambiguity is most evident in the competing generic demands of romantic fiction and the spy thriller, where the former requires the hero to be an object of desire and the latter requires him to be an active subject. The narrative point of view in The Scarlet Pimpernel is primarily that of Marguerite, who spends much time observing her husband and musing on the change he has undergone since they were first married. In this sense, he plays the role of the hero in romantic fiction who remains an enigma until the final denouement (Modleski 1984):

Marguerite looked at him tentatively once or twice; she could see his handsome profile, and one lazy eye, with its straight fine brow and drooping lid.

The face in the moonlight looked singularly earnest, and recalled to Marguerite’s aching heart those happy days of courtship, before he had become the lazy nincompoop, the effete fop, whose life seemed spent in card- and supper-rooms.

But now, in the moonlight, she could not catch the expression of the lazy blue eyes; she could only see the outline of the firm chin, the corner of the strong mouth, the well-cut massive shape of the forehead; truly, nature had meant well by Sir Percy . . .

(Orczy 1905: 141)

As with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), The Scarlet Pimpernel offers an external view of Englishness, told largely from the point of view of the French exile Marguerite rather than Blakeney. The effect of this is to make Blakeney strange, so that he becomes the mysterious ‘other’ rather than Marguerite, who is a point of identification for the reader. For Marguerite and for the reader, Blakeney is unknown and unknowable. Even as he masterfully drives his coach and four on long journeys through the night, he holds the reins ‘in his slender feminine hands’ (Orczy 1905: 78). His gender identity is fluid, and the implication throughout the novel is that Blakeney, while powerful, is mercurial in his ability to transform himself.

The second Scarlet Pimpernel novel attempts to fix Blakeney more securely as a heroic figure:

The full magnetism of the man was apparent now. . . . The man of the world – the fastidious dandy – had shed his mask; there stood the leader, calm, serene in the very face of the most deadly danger that had encompassed any man, looking that danger fully in the face, not striving to belittle it or to exaggerate it, but weighing it in the balance with what there was to accomplish; the rescue of a martyred, innocent child from the hands of fiends who were destroying his very soul even more completely than his body.

(Orczy 1913: 71)

This description is much more aligned with the adventure heroes of the late nineteenth century, which promoted a Victorian manliness based on aristocratic birth, arrogance and omniscient leadership (Boyd 2003: 50–1). Yet Blakeney compromises even this already-outdated heroism by slipping back into the dandy persona: ‘His usual débonnair [sic] manner was on him once again, his laziness, his careless insouciance. He was even at this moment deeply engaged in flicking off a grain of dust from the immaculate Mechlin cuff at his wrist’ (Orczy 1913: 77). In Eldorado (1913), Blakeney is engaged in a plot to rescue the infant dauphin from the squalid Temple Prison; once again, the innate heroism of the nobility wins out against brutish Republican foes. Set amid such a rigidly delineated battle between the upper and lower classes, Blakeney cuts a strange figure, able to pass as a common stonemason and furniture remover, due to his ‘abnormal physique and iron nerve’ (Orczy 1913: 127). Blakeney’s double identity as foppish English aristocrat and Scarlet Pimpernel, compounded with his many transformations, contradict any secure heroic persona.

This unstable hero is also an odd English gentleman, for while he is a nobleman with the ear of the Prince of Wales, his background is compromised by a mentally unstable mother, apparently driven mad by marriage: ‘His father, the late Sir Algernon Blakeney, had had the terrible misfortune of seeing an idolised young wife become hopelessly insane after two years of happily married life’ (Orczy 1905: 48). To avoid the scandal of insanity in the family, Algernon Blakeney takes his wife and child to an unspecified ‘abroad’, where Percy grows up, eventually settling in England with his French bride. Blakeney’s fluency in French is thus explicable, but his background is consequently more European than English. This is another aspect of the novel where the genres of romantic and spy fiction clash: Blakeney’s background and mysterious identity make him an effective romantic hero but, as a spy, his skills in deception and disguise ally him with the evil Other of the novel, the wicked Chauvelin. Blakeney’s mutable identity also problematises his motivation for becoming the Scarlet Pimpernel in the first place; if Blakeney is faking it as an aristocratic English buffoon, Englishness is also part of his motivation. Blakeney is nothing if not a gentleman spy setting out with his followers to play the ‘great game’ on French soil. Why, with a childhood spent ‘abroad’, does Blakeney assay an English cause? Within the novel, such concerns are explained in terms of class loyalty; Blakeney sets out to save fellow aristocrats, although the narrative asserts the superiority of English aristocracy above all others.

The Scarlet Pimpernel thus offers an early example of the confusions and contradictions of spy fiction and the male spy. The plot transports the protagonists from France to England and back to France, ending as the happy couple set foot on English soil again with all misunderstandings resolved and Monsieur Chauvelin banished from London society. As a romantic adventure, Orczy’s novel offers the pleasures of foreign travel without any of the inconveniences. The reader is transported from the cosy order of the Fisherman’s Rest in Dover to the squalid chaos of the Chat Gris in Calais, without any doubt that these hostelries represent the opposing characteristics of England and France. In Harold Young’s film, the adventures of the Pimpernel are irrevocably linked to a ‘timeless’ Englishness by Leslie Howard, as Percy Blakeney, reciting the ‘this England’ speech from Richard II in the closing scenes. Such romances seem to offer simple oppositions between masculinity and femininity, England and the enemy, but they also raise questions about such apparently simple categories.

The gentleman spy: John Buchan’s Richard Hannay

Like Percy Blakeney, John Buchan’s Richard Hannay is also an amateur spy, although he arguably becomes more of a professional as the series of novels progress (Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987: 90, Bloom 1990: 5, Trotter 1990: 42). Buchan’s hero embodies principles of amateur gamesmanship which are pitted against a narrow professionalism (Panek 1981: 56). Hannay first appears in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and is inadvertently caught up in international espionage. He thus enters the world of the spy by chance rather than choice, and this, to a large extent, absolves him of the need to examine too closely the ethics of spying (Macintosh 1990). In this first novel, he adopts the disguises and deceptions of the spy out of necessity, as he is on the run from the fellowship of the Black Stone and also from the police. Hannay’s motive for becoming involved is explained as a personal obligation and sense of duty: ‘Somehow or other the sight of Scudder’s dead face had made me a passionate believer in his scheme. He was gone, but he had taken me into his confidence, and I was pretty well bound to carry on his work’ (Buchan 1915: 27).

‘Schoolboy-honour’ runs high in these novels (Atkins 1984: 140), and Hannay’s subsequent comment – that the ‘long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place’ (Buchan 1915: 27) – speaks of a social contract rooted in class, gender and nation. While such language recalls public-school Englishness, it is confounded by Hannay’s initial impression of England. As a Scottish ex-pat recently returned from South Africa, Hannay confesses that he regarded England as an exotic destination – ‘England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me’ – and a huge disappointment: ‘I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. . . . The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn’t get enough exercise and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water’ (Buchan 1915: 13).

England is both strange and decadent to this returning colonial. The unhealthy Englishman Hannay describes is indicative of contemporary concerns regarding the physical and mental health of the nation; an anxiety also felt across the Atlantic (Park 1987, Richardson 2004). Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908) made a direct connection between the colonial experience and a manliness that many saw as lacking in native Englishmen (Warren 1987). The Hannay novels outline a debate about what constitutes Englishness – and what kind of England is being fought for. The ThirtyNine Steps was published a year into the Great War but is set shortly before it begins. From the outset, Englishness appears vulnerable – in The Thirty- Nine Steps the threat is envisaged as an insidious foreign invasion of master spies on British soil, yet the solution to that threat also comes from beyond the national boundaries of England itself. Franklin P. Scudder, the agent whose death invokes Hannay’s allegiance, is a journalist and linguist from Kentucky who brings news of an international conspiracy against England. In this first novel, ‘the ordinary Englishman’ appears ill-equipped to fight such cunning foes; while Hannay admires the working men that he meets, he is scathing about the chattering middle classes (Panek 1981: 58). The old country is in danger of losing its ability to fight, having become fat and lazy on the profits of Empire. Hannay has little time for bureaucracy and middle-class suburbia, as the Englishness favoured here is that of an idealised working man who knows his place, together with a ruling class who know theirs. Scudder describes the conspiracy he is fighting in the following terms:

I gathered that most of the people in it were the sort of educated anarchists that make revolutions, but that beside them there were financiers who were playing for money. A clever man can make big profits on a falling market, and it suited the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears. . . .

When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.

(Buchan 1915: 16–17)

This statement makes clear the ground of battle; this conflict is about...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Spies, Lies and Sexual Outlaws
• 2 Femmes Fatales and British Grit
• 3 Dolly Birds
• 4 English Roses and All-American Girls
• 5 Nikita
• 6 Alias
• Notes
• Bibliography