Gender imagery
The memoirist pays specific attention to the imagery of appearing male, because she goes undercover as a man to party and have fun, and to learn about her culture. She finds that being a man leads to an entirely different aesthetic, because the experience of life is perfectly different from what she experienced as a woman. The imagery portrays men as free and women as slaves.
Desert imagery
Because she is a Nomad, Eberhardt spends a lot of time wandering the desert in true Arabian style, often on camel, or walking alongside her camel, often very thirsty, in dust and waves of sand. Then there is the sun, all imagery pointing to the heat and brutal isolation of the desert. The desert is the domain for a metaphysical emptiness that Eberhardt finds cleansing. It is a visual depiction of where Eberhardt finds her higher self.
Religion in imagery
The mosques and Qurans of the book are a beautiful portrait of life in a religious community. Unlike the secularized life she experiences in Europe, these communities are deeply religious, and through that religion, the impose cultural views that, secretly Eberhardt resists, although she never lets that stop her from fitting in. The stakes of her behavior are deathly, because of the severity of her community's religion.
Literature and freedom
Through cultivating her point of view, the author finds a way to be perfectly free. She expresses her relationship to language and books as a method for imagination and true freedom. She is autonomous because her experience of life has been supplemented by her love for literature. She was especially shaped by the keen moral eye of Dostoevsky who often wrote about social hypocrisy.
