Mildred Pierce

One of the genres Cain is riffing on is the 19th-century Horatio Alger narrative that undergirds the ideal of the American Dream: that the lowliest person with a can-do attitude can pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Even as Mildred’s personal life is in disarray, her business is going swimmingly. She’s opening up new restaurants, forming a corporation, and effectively managing her employees—some of whom she met on her way up. It’s an uplifting story of capitalism: The Depression does not seem to hinder Mildred’s customer acquisition rates; rather, the repeal of the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages boosts her profits and the restaurants’ social standing. Mildred’s rising tide lifts other boats as well: Ida goes from hostess to restaurant manager to co-owner, while Lucy, who has insightfully realized that once alcohol becomes legal again, it “wasn't going to be the same as it had been in the old days. It was going to be respectable, and it was going to put the restaurant business on its feet” (174), wants to pivot her liquor runner Ike’s business towards legal trucking by becoming Mildred’s liquor supplier.

While the novel’s adult women develop independent ways to earn money, Veda flails on the margins of the economic system. She is not wealthy enough to be one kind of outlier—a woman of leisure, pursuing high society parties and being a musical dilettante—so when she loses one music teacher and is rejected by another, she falls in with the demi-monde: a crowd of would-be actors. She then sinks even lower, becoming a complete outsider engaging in criminal behavior—blackmailing a wealthy family by pretending to be pregnant.

Veda is a narcissist who is incapable of empathy—modern readers may detect in her portrayal current psychological diagnoses like sociopathy or narcissistic personality disorder. As Letty points out, Veda will not join any group or participate in any activity in which she is not immediately the center of attention. When she does not receive the grand piano she was expecting for Christmas, she viciously takes out her fury on Mildred, trying to say the most hurtful things she can think of: that Monty is closer to Veda than to Mildred, that Monty only uses Mildred for sex. She is only partially correct: Monty is using Mildred, but for money. Although Veda lives in total disregard of her mother, Mildred never gives up hope that she and Veda will develop a warm, loving, and supportive relationship. Concerned for Veda’s ostensible pregnancy and her lack of financial support, Mildred leaves no stone unturned to find the young man who would morally be obligated to provide for Veda and baby. However, Veda’s criminality finally is a bridge too far. Mildred throws her daughter out, shocked at this latest betrayal: “[S]he was consumed by a fury so cold that it almost seemed as though she felt nothing at all. […] she was acting less like a mother than like a lover who has unexpectedly discovered an act of faithlessness” (240).

The sordid sexual triangle of Mildred, Veda, and Monty is the novel’s moral morass—a stark contrast to its clean plotline of business success. Mildred finds it difficult to make a clean break from Monty because of the power of her sexual desire for him. He too finds Mildred deeply attractive physically, despite perceiving himself as superior to Mildred in virtually every other respect. This ambivalence anchors the scenes between them in a push and pull dynamic: Even when she has made up her mind to break off the relationship, Mildred several times feels ready to give into his romantic advances; while he likewise by turns lashes out, and then praises her. Underlying all of this is Mildred’s suspicion of Monty’s intentions towards Veda, Monty’s open preference for Veda as an intellectual equal, and his hidden sexual attraction to the young woman. The steaminess of these competing desires, their skirting of the incest taboo, and their general unpleasantness mires this novel firmly in the noir genre, where no one is blameless and every human desire is a corruption.