![]() With his wife dead, he parceled his children off to relatives and went about pursuing his fortune. ![]() Her mother was a kind and long-suffering woman 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 real person, 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 Mata Hari's inner life are all the more credible for her close study of the details surrounding the historical case. Her audience is her prosecutor/interrogator, Bouchardon, and the nuns charged with caring for her in solitary confinement. ![]() Thus, in Murphy's artful hands, the story of her life emerges as a series of anecdotal tales, reveries and reflections, delivered Scheherazade-like, as - imprisoned and awaiting execution - she tries to seduce the authorities into clemency. ![]()
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