As explained above, the autoerotic moment reveals Charlotte's sexuality as both queer, which is to say unexpected--a fin-de-siecle wife's onanism--and ambiguous--given her latent bisexuality.
Over the centuries, mental illness has been attributed to everything from a "badness of spirit" (Aristotle) and a "humoral imbalance" (Galen) to autoerotic fixation (Freud) and the weakness of the hierarchical state of the ego (Jung).
In support of this idea Freud is quoted, and for example, this text: "Modern education uses much of the sport to divert the attention of youth from sexual activity; it would be more right to say that it replaces sexual specific satisfaction (joy) with that which causes the movement and that it causes sexual activity to regress at one of its autoerotic stages.
Penile strangulations with use of hair, ring, thread, tape and bottle neck which might be due to mental issues or autoerotic purposes have been reported (5).
Case reports detailing polyembolokoilamania in adults focus on autoerotic mishaps leading to medical and surgical complications including death [11-13].
The narrator of the title story is inordinately fond of firearms yet manages to evade the authorities following a shooting spree that includes taking down "a store window with a garden gnome on display and a fourteen-foot plastic Triceratops that floated above one of the department stores." In other stories, characters use copious amounts of drugs, engage in autoerotic asphyxiation and, each in their own way, wreak havoc on people and property alike.
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