For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond

To analyze any cultural texts it is essential to understand them in relation to their historical contexts. This is especially the case for popular fiction, which is more sensitive to the demands of the market and the tastes of consumers than high-brow culture. Like all products of popular culture, the Bond stories are tracts for their times: they are informed by and respond to the ideological climate in which they were produced and consumed. The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in April 1953 and thereafter the books appeared regularly at one-year intervals until 1965, with the last novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. The short-story anthology Octopussy and The Living Daylights was published after Fleming’s death. Sales of the early hardbacks were respectable if not spectacular (the first hardback edition of Casino Royale had a print run of only 4,750) but the popularity of Bond began to take off in the later 1950s. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, in their cultural studies analysis of the Bond phenomenon, identify 1957—the year From Russia, with Love was serialized in the Daily Express, a popular mass-circulation newspaper—as “the first stage in the transformation of Bond from a character within a set of fictional texts into a household name” (Bond 24). Since 1955, the Bond books were published in paperback: combined sales of all Bond paperbacks rose from 41,000 in 1955 to 58,000 in 1956, 72,000 in 1957, 105,000 in 1958, 237,000 in 1959, 323,000 in 1960 and 670,000 in 1961 (ibid. 26-7). It was in 1962—the year that the first Bond film was released in Britain—that combined sales first passed one million. For literary historian John Sutherland, the Bond books were a landmark in publishing because “they revealed a new reliable market for a certain kind of book that was not trash and could be marketed as a ‘brand name’ (i.e. ‘the latest Bond’)” (176).

David Cannadine has explained the different critical reactions to the Bond novels as reactions to the decline of British power after the Second World War. He points out that the publication history of the novels spans the period from the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953—“a retrospectively unconvincing reaffirmation of Britain’s continued great-power status”—to the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965, an event that represented “not only the last rites of the great man himself, but was also self-consciously recognized as being a requiem for Britain as a great power” (46). The debacle of the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the hurried retreat from empire between 1957 and 1965 rudely drove home the lesson that Britain’s standing in the world was in seemingly terminal decline. There was a strong critique, from both the political right and the political left, that Britain’s decline as a global power was a consequence of declining moral standards at home. The Bond novels, with their emphasis on sex and conspicuous consumption, were seen by some commentators as visible symptoms of this decline. To this extent they can be placed within the same cultural contexts as John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and the “northern realist” novels of authors such as John Braine (Room at the Top) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning).

While, on the face of it, the politics of the Bond novels would seem far removed from the “Angry Young Men”, on closer reading they prove to be highly equivocal about changes in British society.² On the one hand, the social politics of the books are conservative in the extreme. Fleming’s Britain, as Amis suggests, is “substantially right of centre” (96). Thus, The Times is “the only paper Bond ever read” (From Russia, with Love 96) and his mental image of his country is “a world of tennis courts and lily ponds and kings and queens, of London, of people being photographed with pigeons on their heads in Trafalgar Square” (Dr. No 224). Bond’s attachment to the past is indicated by his choice of car (a 1930s Bentley) and his sentimental affection for the old five-pound note—“the most beautiful money in the world” (Goldfinger 66). Bond dislikes the consequences of social change: he takes an instinctive dislike to a taxi-driver whom he considers “typical of the cheap self-assertiveness of young labour since the war” (Thunderball 9) and, somewhat hysterically it must be said, believes that homosexuality is “a direct consequence of giving votes to woman and ‘sex equality’” (Goldfinger 222). Bond himself is characterized as an unequivocal patriot, as the title of the twelfth book, (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) attests, and is often cast in the role of a national champion. His response to the Head of the Japanese Secret Service (who has “formed an unsatisfactory opinion about the British people since the war”) perfectly sums up Bond’s (and Fleming’s) politics: “England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of World Wars, our Welfare State politics may have made us expect too much for free, and the liberation of our Colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes” (You Only Live Twice 81).

On the other hand, however, the Bond novels embrace certain aspects of social and cultural change. Fleming is at some pains to present Bond as a modern, even classless hero. He differs from the clubland heroes of the pre-war British thriller, such as Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond and John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, in so far as he is not a talented amateur—the Drummond stories, especially, tend to give the impression that fighting diabolical criminal masterminds is just another form of “sport” to be fitted in between rubbers or bridge or hearty games of rugger—but a ruthless professional assassin. Time and again the books emphasize Bond’s professionalism, whether getting into peak physical shape for an arduous assignment (Live and Let Die, Dr. No) or acquainting himself with all the known methods of cheating at cards (Moonraker). His attitude towards his job reveals the ultimate professional: “It was his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it. As a secret agent who held the rare double-O prefix—the licence to kill in the Secret Service—it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon” (Goldfinger 3). Bond exemplifies what the social historian Harold Perkin called “the rise of professional society”, one that is “structured around career hierarchies rather than classes, one in which people find their place according to trained expertise and the service they provide rather than the possession or lack of inherited wealth or acquired capital” (359). Contrary to some accounts, Bond is not a quintessentially British gentleman hero: he feels out of place in the cozy clubland world of his generic forbears (“Doesn’t look the sort of chap one usually sees in Blades”) and knows “that there was something alien and un-English about himself” (Moonraker 34). As the critic James Price observed: “It is the fact of his not being a gentleman—both in this sense and in the chivalric meaning of the word—which immediately distinguishes him from Buchan’s Richard Hannay” (69).

The social politics of the Bond novels—which, it seems reasonable to assume, broadly reflect Fleming’s own views—are essential to understanding the role and representation of women in the stories. One of the features that most obviously distinguished the Bond stories from previous generations of British thrillers was the greater visibility of women both in narrative terms and as sexualized objects. Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay, for example, had little room for women: both seemed more comfortable in homosocial relationships with close groups of male friends than in their marriages to Phyllis Benton and Mary Lamington. Bond, in contrast, meets a different girl in each novel—Fleming invariably refers to the heroine as “the girl”—and usually enjoys a sexual union with her by the story’s end. (Moonraker is the exception to this rule: Bond does not sleep with Gala Brand who is engaged to a police officer.) While Bond’s sexual conquests in the books do not match the numbers in the films—in most stories there is just the one main girl—he was nevertheless the first protagonist of spy fiction to indulge his sexual appetite so openly and frequently.³

The graphic (for the time) accounts of sex in the Bond books have caused some critics to see them in the context of the emergence of mass-market pornography during the 1950s. In his study of British spy literature, for example, Michael Denning avers that “the James Bond tales can rightly be seen as an important early form of the mass pornography that characterizes the consumer society, the society of the spectacle, that emerges in Western Europe and North America in the wake of post-war reconstruction” (Cover 109-10). Fleming lent credence to this view when he remarked that “the target of my books […] lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh” (“How To Write A Thriller” 14). There are many instances of erotic spectacle in the Bond novels: the gypsy-girl fight in From Russia, with Love and the performance of the strip-tease artiste in The Man with the Golden Gun are just two. It is symbolic that the publication of the first Bond novel came in the same year as the launch (in America) of Playboy, the first mainstream pornographic men’s magazine. While it was not until the 1960s that the link between Bond and Playboy was institutionalized, when the magazine serialized some of the later stories as well as running photo-spreads of starlets from the Bond films, from the outset there was a clear parallel in their representation of sexuality. Like Playboy, the Bond novels construct a male fantasy world of sexually available females and guilt-free sexual relationships. Fleming’s somewhat outré names for his female characters—including Tiffany Case, Honeychile Rider, Kissy Suzuki, Mary Goodnight and most notoriously Pussy Galore—have sometimes been seen as a parody, though they serve to reinforce the association between femininity and sexuality.

The other way in which the Bond novels exemplify the Playboy ethos is in their representation of guilt-free sexual relationships. Sex in the Bond stories is something to be enjoyed rather than regarded as a sordid affair. As Bond reflects on his night of passion with Jill Masterton in Goldfinger: “It hadn’t been love […] Neither had had regrets. Had they committed a sin? If so, which one?” (48). This emphasis on guilt-free sex is associated with female as well as male desire. The Bond Girl is usually characterized as being independent and willful. Domino Vitali, for example, is “an independent girl, a girl of authority and character […] She might sleep with men, obviously did, but it would be on her terms and not on theirs” (Thunderball 115). The emphasis here on the woman’s freedom to make her own sexual choices can be seen as an early stirring of the greater social and sexual freedom that emerged in Britain during the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s, especially following the availability of the contraceptive pill (Marwick 21). This is not to say, however, that the Bond stories reflect a particularly progressive view of women’s sexuality. Indeed Fleming’s view of what women really want from sex would surely be enough to leave some readers apoplectic with rage: “All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful” (The Spy Who Loved Me 148). Even an otherwise assertive and independent woman such as Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service “knows” that her proper position is laying on her back: “Make love to me […] Do anything you like. And tell me what you like and what you would like from me. Be rough with me. Treat me like the lowest whore in creation” (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 31). To this extent the Bond stories reassert a traditional—and culturally problematic—male fantasy of women’s sexuality.

Tony Bennett has modified Eco’s reading of the Bond stories by analyzing them in terms of a set of narrative codes—the “sexist code”, the “imperialist code”, and the “phallic code”—which regulate the relationships between characters. The imperialist code, for example, regulates the relations between Bond (British) and his allies (foreign), who are presented in subordinate roles, while the phallic code informs the relationships between Bond and M (who endows him with authority: his “licence to kill”) and between Bond and the villain (who threatens Bond with castration through torture: literally so in the case of Le Chiffre in Casino Royale). The sexist code is posited on the notion that the girl is usually “out of place” either ideologically, in that she is in the service of the villain (as in Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia, with Love, Thunderball and Goldfinger), and/or sexually, in that she is either physically or emotionally “damaged”, and is initially resistant to Bond (as in Casino Royale, Diamonds Are Forever, Dr. No, and Goldfinger). In this reading Bond’s seduction of the girl serves an ideological purpose as he “repositions” her into the “correct” place: he seduces her away from the villain and/or restores her normative heterosexuality. As Bennett argues: “In thus replacing the girl in a subordinate position in relation to men, Bond simultaneously repositions her within the sphere of ideology in general, detaching her from the service of the villain and recruiting her in support of his own mission” (“James Bond as Popular Hero” 13). This interpretation of the gender relations of the books also explains why Bond does not sleep with Gala Brand in Moonraker: she is neither working for the villain (she is an undercover policewoman) nor is she emotionally damaged.

It may have been partly as a response to the criticisms of sexism levelled against his books that Fleming once tried to place the girl at the center of a Bond narrative. The ninth novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, is unusual in that it is written in the first person from the perspective of heroine Vivienne Michel and that James Bond enters only two-thirds of the way into the book. Eco excludes The Spy Who Loved Me from his analysis on the grounds that it “seems quite untypical” (“Narrative” 38). Yet the novel is part of the corpus of Bond texts and cannot be left aside simply because it does not conform to a particular theoretical framework. It would be fair to say that Fleming’s attempt to present a woman’s point-of-view is less than wholly successful. The book was not well received and Fleming never wrote another one like it (Lycett 401-2). Jeremy Black has suggested that The Spy Who Loved Me was more in the tradition of the so-called “kitchen sink” realism exemplified by John Braine’s Room at the Top (which had been filmed to great acclaim in 1959) than the imperialist spy thriller (71-2). Fleming’s account of how Vivienne loses her virginity at the back of a dingy cinema includes the sort of sordid detail that characterizes the social realist novels of the time. Nevertheless there is some evidence that Fleming was attempting to say something more serious about attitudes towards women in 1950s Britain. Vivienne’s first sexual experience with her boyfriend Derek presents her not as the instigator but as a woman who has been exploited: “Now I couldn’t refuse him! He would come back and it would be messy and horrible in this filthy little box in this filthy little backstreet cinema and it was going to hurt and he would despise me afterwards for giving in” (The Spy Who Loved Me 28). The book is particularly notable for its unsympathetic representation of men. Vivienne’s first boyfriend Derek is a wealthy public schoolboy who dumps her after having his way with her because his parents disapprove of her. Her second lover is a German called Kurt who makes her have an abortion when she becomes pregnant. While the first half of the book is successful in presenting Vivienne as a more rounded character than other Bond Girls, in the second half she resorts to type. Vivienne is running a motel in upstate New York when the owner sends two gangsters to burn it down as part of an insurance fraud. The two “hoods” are about to rape Vivienne when, miraculously, James Bond arrives. He immediately understands the situation, rescues Vivienne, kills the gangsters, makes love to her, and leaves in the morning. Vivienne constructs a romantic fantasy of Bond as a man who “had come from nowhere, like the prince in the fairy tales, and he had saved me from the dragon […] And then, when the dragon was dead, he had taken me as his own reward” (The Spy Who Loved Me 147).

The Spy Who Loved Me should be seen as a flawed but genuine attempt to identify with the woman’s point of view. However, it was bound by the extent of its difference from the other stories to remain a one-off experiment, hence its marginalization in most accounts of Fleming’s stories. Yet in its own curious way it exemplifies the paradoxical nature of the gender politics of Fleming’s Bond. On the one hand Fleming sought to present women as independent and in control of their own sexuality. The emphasis in his books on sexual freedom for both men and women can be seen as anticipating the emergence of the “permissive society” in the 1960s. This would be taken further in the James Bond films, which began in 1962. But on the other hand the perpetuation of gender stereotypes and the representation of women as sexualized objects means that the books are unable to explore the social consequences of this independence in a realistic way. Ultimately what the Bond books seem to suggest is that greater sexual freedom for women amounted to greater sexual opportunities for men. At their worst they pander to male fantasies that women are “easy” and willing sexual partners. This tension between the progressive and the conservative (in some cases even downright reactionary) is a constant feature of the books and it is this tension that makes them such fascinating cultural artefacts.