Modernism and the Male World: The Crisis of Masculinity in The Bed of Procrustes

Several significant modernist techniques are effectively displayed in Camil Petrescu’s The Bed of Procrustes, a novel emblematic of the century’s sexual anxiety and anesthesia and of the uninhabitable, fractured landscape that evokes a Procrustean bed. The novel’s parallel story lines animate male homosocial desire, a crisis of masculinity, and an acute dissociation of sensibility, akin to the ‘hysteric’ disposition of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and corresponding to his broodings in the famous essay praising the Metaphysical poets. In Petrescu’s novel, the two male protagonists – a poet whose cultural and personal anxieties both embody and perform male hysteria and his modernist double whose own sexual anxiety forges an hysteric identification with the poet that transcends male homosocial bonding – reflect modern man’s aesthetic and cultural detachment and disembodiment that The Bed of Procrustes, following Baudelaire, Pound, and Eliot, ultimately delineates.