Code Name Hélène

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes a discussion of sexual assault and wartime violence.

Nancy Wake lived in the 1930s and 1940s when women’s opportunities were curtailed by sexist limitations to their professional opportunities and assumptions about their weakness and passiveness. They also faced persistent sexual harassment. Throughout the novel, Nancy combats sexist expectations and treatment and rises above them.

In her civilian life as a journalist, Nancy faces sexist discrimination from her editor at Hearst. When she gets a scoop, interviewing a Jewish refugee from Vienna who had been the subject of a photograph documenting the Nazi violence there, the editor initially refuses to run her story because they have “a man” in Berlin who is supposed to be covering the region. When Nancy’s story is finally published, it does not have her byline, because Hearst does not publish the names of female journalists. When her colleague Frank Gilmore objects, she minimizes the injustice because she “hate[s] being pitied” (83). Nancy overcame journalism’s endemic sexism to win a job as a reporter, but she finds that there are some barriers in the industry that she cannot surmount.

One of the biggest challenges Nancy faces while camped out with the Resistance is sexual harassment and the threat of sexual violence. When she first meets the Maquis leader, Gaspard, he suggests to his colleagues that they should “seduce the woman, then kill her and relieve her of the money” (41). She is the only woman in the Maquis campsite, and on her first morning there, she has “the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen” (111). The men make passes at her, spy on her while she is peeing and bathing, and harass her. She is forced to use violence and threats of withholding aid to ensure her safety.

Whereas Nancy had capitulated to her editor’s sexist policy not to print her name on her work, however, during the war Nancy learns to demand the respect of the men around her until they give it to her. When the head of the volunteer ambulance corps initially turns her away because “we have no women drivers” (206), Nancy refuses to accept his rejection and convinces him to let her help. She enforces her authority in the Maquis camp by proving to them that she is capable and willing to defend herself and making it clear to them that she has the power to provide or withhold the support they need. She finally wins the full support and respect of the Maquis leaders when she shows him that she can drink just as well as any man.

Overcoming the sexist expectations of women, therefore, requires Nancy to prove that she can fight and drink like a man. But Nancy holds on to her femininity, too, describing her signature red lipstick as her “armor” and occasionally using men’s underestimation of her as a weapon against them.

Nancy takes head-on the sexist society she is living in. She never allows it to hold her back from her goals of supporting the Resistance against the Nazis. Nancy uses all of the tools at her disposal—her physical strength, her wits, and even her beauty—to accomplish feats beyond what was typically expected of a woman in her era.