Gendering the Great Depression: rethinking the male body in 1930s American culture and literature

Abstract

This article explores the cultural and literary representation of male bodies during the Great Depression in the United States. While the mainstream model of American masculinity has traditionally linked men's identity to their breadwinning role, this essay shows how the Great Depression caused millions of American males to feel emasculated by their incapacity to provide for their families. It is argued, therefore, that the Roosevelt administration aimed, at least in part, to ‘remasculinize’ America by promoting numerous images of ‘hard’ bodies at work, as may be seen in several New Deal public murals of the time. This remasculinizing effort was complemented by Marxist authors and critics, perhaps most notably Michael Gold, who established a correlation between gender and class by suggesting a dichotomy between hard/masculine/working-class authors, on the one hand, and soft/effete/upper-class writers, on the other. Nevertheless, this study concludes by calling this very binary into question, underlining several counter-images and contradictions that inevitably inform it. If documentary literature questioned Mike Gold's hypermasculine view of the proletariat by providing images of vulnerable yet dignified male bodies, writers such as John Steinbeck and painters such as Paul Cadmus also problematized, as we shall see, Gold's masculinist and homophobic rhetoric from particularly interesting and subversive perspectives.