Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

After Mildred’s husband loses his job in the Depression and takes up with another woman, she’s left with two children to support and a mortgage hanging over her head. Confronted with the task of fending for herself for the first time, she swallows her considerable pride and becomes a waitress, then a restaurant owner, then owner of a chain of restaurants and a woman of society. Driving her all the while is the thought of her children, especially her cold and proud daughter Veda, whom Mildred loves more than anything else in the world.

Cain’s better known for his noir antiheroes and slinky femme fatales, as in The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity (adapted into equally classic noir films). So his portrait of Mildred as a struggling, desperate, at times unlikable but in many ways admirable and resourceful woman was as surprising as it was convincing, a wrenchingly dramatic rags to riches story that’s grounded in mundane reality. He writes with unexpected clarity about the limited choices available to a woman like Mildred, pregnant and married at seventeen, who never expected to work outside of her home. I found myself really pulling for Mildred as she puts her life together, battling social expectations as well as her own fears and terrors.

Another unlooked for pleasure was the depiction of friendship between women – especially with worldly Mrs Gessler, supplier of bootleg alcohol and sexual advice, and efficient Ida who shows Mildred the ropes in the diner at her first job. Again, unexpected insight from a hard-boiled crime writer into a female world, of women who aren’t molls or dames, but allies, peers, equals – actual real people! Even Mildred’s ex-husband’s new mistress is humanised. Instead it’s the men of the novel who get short shrift, portrayed variously as bumblers, moochers, and sharks.

Mildred’s success is heady but underlined with dread, because you know it can’t last. I think it’s typical of the period (the book was published in 1941) that Mildred, as a single and sexually free woman, can’t rise without experiencing a concurrent fall. Just as Mildred is ‘punished’ for spending a night with a new lover by the illness of a family member, so her financial success and personal ambitions too cannot be sustained.

The key to Mildred’s ultimate undoing and the darkest element of the novel is Mildred’s obsessive love for Veda, and Veda’s indifference and hatred for Mildred. Veda is a startlingly cold and unlikable figure, unnervingly poised and deceptive from even a very young age. More than any other character in the novel, Veda seems like a construct rather than a real person – an effect I think is intentional. Veda is everything Mildred ever wanted to be: beautiful, proud, upwardly mobile, musically gifted. And of course Mildred, so bourgeois and so desperate, is everything Veda wants to leave behind. They are each others’ shadows.

So bear in mind that although I’ve focused on the positive and unlikely pleasures of this novel, there will be no happy ending. But personally, I found the rather scathing and cynical things Cain has to say about mothers and daughters, men and women, were balanced out by those other elements. Mildred Pierce is an absorbing, complex and unsettling melodrama, in the best sense of the word.

AL: 8/10

Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain