"Violent and Sentimental by Turns": The Gendered Discourses of Mike Gold

Proletarian writer Michael Gold famously adopts a pose of exaggerated virility in his theoretical writing as a defense against charges of the effeminacy that was associated with intellectuals, with mass culture, and with Jewish men. But the portraits Gold draws in his autobiographical novel, Jews Without Money, suggest a more complex gendered and ethnic rhetoric through which he idealizes feminized, sentimental domesticity as a counterpoint to gangsterism, the myth of the wild west, and the drive for an authentic, manly American identity. By yoking together the registers of the sentimental and the violent in his writing, Gold seeks not only to move his readers emotionally, but also to goad them toward revolutionary action. This motivational mission justifies Gold's writing as valuable labor rather than the intellectual parasitism and aesthetic prostitution he consistently condemns.