bicycle

In a novel by Maurice Leblanc of 1898, entitled Voici des Ailes, the bicycle allows the two couples in the book to escape the narrow spatial framework of their former city lives, the constricted social world of their ill-suited marriages, the physical confinements of corsets and tight-fitting clothing, and the emotional restrictions of their sexual morality. (Kern, Culture of Time and Space, p.113)

The bicycle alters the human body: "this is not two different things like man and horse. There is not man and machine. There is faster man."

The bicycle returns as "La Veuve du Coureur" in Robert Muller's masturbatory device in the 1959 Surrealist exposition whose deliberate intent is to shock.