[3] An American author (her name is not provided) sojourns in the Tangier International Zone during the 1930s, wishing to live cheaply on a generous advance from her publisher while writing a novel.
He explains to her that syphilis, leprosy and pneumonia may be admitted in polite company, but never tuberculosis, a disease he associates with degenerate "Paris morals."
Midj is momentarily scandalized, but she reassures the youths by casually laying several hundred francs on the table as she pretends to search for a mirror in her handbag.
At the picnic site at the villa, the boys devour the forbidden wine and ham, more as an act of defiance against parental rule than because they enjoy it.
Rape, incest, lesbianism, homosexuality, adultery, and simple betrayal, with all their attending virulence, betoken the most complete negation of human love to which a novelist can may refer."
[7] The focal character of the story, a nameless America novelist, is sojourning in Tangiers, ostensibly for the favorable exchange rate which makes living there cheap, though "she is also led by a vague yearning for sexual adventure.
"[8] Her "romantic yearning" and a desire to escape the "puritanical morality of America" appear attainable in the cosmopolitan environment of the International Zone.
Biographer Allen Hibbard comments on the encounter between "radically different cultures":[10] To the Moroccan male, she becomes an unwitting symbol of available sexuality and corruption.
Desire to possess the Western woman…is fed by advertising and economic deprivation, and a conquest is a sign of virility as well as a way of avenging a gnawing condition of political impotence.
Lawrence Steward writes: The tea ceremony—like hospitality itself, which is to unite men in peace and understanding — is here shelter perversion.
It is the hunt without the kill…Since terror is an essential ingredient to her pleasure, she flaunts her money and her solitude, pretending to be an easy victim.