''Mildred Pierce'' is a
psychological drama
Psychological drama or psychodrama is a sub-genre of drama that places emphasis on psychological elements. It often overlaps with other genres such as crime, fantasy, black comedy, and science fiction, and it is closely related with the psychologi ...
by
James M. Cain
James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892 – October 27, 1977) was an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is widely regarded as a progenitor of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction.
His novels ''The Postman Always Rings Twice ...
published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1941.
A story of “social inequity and opportunity in America" set during the
Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
, ''Mildred Pierce'' follows the trajectory of a lower-middle class divorcee with two children in her tragic struggle to achieve financial and personal success. The novel is one of four major works Cain wrote featuring opera as a key component in the plot (''
Serenade
In music, a serenade (; also sometimes called a serenata, from the Italian) is a musical composition or performance delivered in honor of someone or something. Serenades are typically calm, light pieces of music. The term comes from the Italian w ...
'' (1937), ''
Career in C Major
Career in C Major is an opera-themed novella by American writer James M. Cain, first published in 1938.
First appearing as a serial in The American Magazine entitled "Two Can Sing", this comic romance is a departure from Cain's first novels, The P ...
'' (1938) and ''The Moth'' (1948) are the others.)
''Mildred Pierce'' is Cain’s first effort to write a novel in the
third-person narrative form, a departure from his earlier works of the 1930s, all of them confessional narratives written in the
first-person.
Plot
Set in
Glendale, California
Glendale is a city in the San Fernando Valley and Verdugo Mountains regions of Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, California, United States. At the 2020 United States Census, 2020 U.S. Census the population was 196,543, up from ...
in the 1930s, the book is the story of a middle-class housewife, Mildred Pierce, and her attempts to maintain her family's social position during the
Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
.
Mildred separates from Bert, her unemployed husband, and sets out to support herself and her children. After a difficult search, she finds a job as a waitress, but she worries that it is beneath her middle-class station. More than that, she worries that her ambitious and increasingly pretentious elder daughter, Veda, will think her new job demeaning. Mildred encounters both success and failure as she opens three successful restaurants, operates a pie-selling business, and copes with the death of her younger daughter, Ray. Veda enjoys her mother's newfound financial success but increasingly turns ungrateful, demanding more and more from her hard-working mother while openly condemning her and anyone else who must work for a living.
When Mildred discovers her daughter's plot to blackmail a wealthy family with a fake pregnancy, she kicks her out of their house. Veda, who has been training to become an opera singer, goes on to great fame, and Mildred's increasing obsession with her daughter leads her to use her former lover, Monty (a man who, like Mildred, lost his family's wealth at the start of the Great Depression), and his social status and connection to bring Veda back into her life. Unfortunately for Mildred, this means buying Monty's family estate and using her earnings to pay for Veda's extravagances. Mildred and Monty marry, but things go sour as her lavish lifestyle and neglect of her businesses have dramatically affected the company's profits. Creditors line up, led by Wally, a former business associate of Bert's, with whom Mildred had a brief affair upon their separation. With no one to turn to, Mildred confesses to Bert that she has been embezzling money from her company in order to buy Veda's love.
Having decided that the only course of action is to ask Veda to contribute some of her now considerable earnings to balance the books and fearing that Wally might target the girl's assets if they are exposed Mildred goes to her room to confront her. She finds Veda in bed with her stepfather. Monty reproaches Mildred for using him to bring Veda back and for her attitude to him as a financial dependent of hers, while Veda affects boredom but joins in to chide Mildred for embarrassing her and taking glory in her success. Mildred snaps, brutally attacking and strangling her daughter, who now appears incapable of singing and loses her singing contract.
Weeks pass as Mildred moves to
Reno, Nevada
Reno ( ) is a city in the northwest section of the U.S. state of Nevada, along the Nevada-California border, about north from Lake Tahoe, known as "The Biggest Little City in the World". Known for its casino and tourism industry, Reno is the ...
to establish residency in order to get a speedy divorce from Monty. Bert visits her. Mildred ultimately is forced to resign from her business empire, leaving it to Ida, a former company assistant. Bert and Mildred, upon the finalization of her divorce, remarry. Veda travels to Reno and apparently reconciles with Mildred, but several months later, Veda reveals that her voice has healed and announces that she is moving to New York City with Monty. The "reconciliation" (which had been accompanied by reporters and photographers) was designed to defuse the negative publicity resulting from the affair with her stepfather, and it emerges the apparent loss of her voice was a ploy so that she could renege on her existing singing contract and be free to take up a more lucrative one offered by another company. As she leaves the house, a broken Mildred, encouraged by Bert, eventually says "to hell" with the monstrous Veda, and the pair agree to get "stinko" (drunk).
Characters
* Mildred Pierce – a middle-class mother of two
* Bert Pierce – Mildred's first and, later, her third husband
* Moire ("Ray") Pierce – Mildred's younger daughter
* Veda Pierce – Mildred's elder daughter
* Wally Burgan – Bert's former business partner
* Monty Beragon – a wealthy playboy, Mildred's lover and later her second husband
* Lucy Gessler – Mildred's friend
* Ida Corwin – Mildred's supervisor; later business partner
Publication history
Cain’s desire to write a novel about “a grass widow with two small children to support” had its origins in 1932 from a suggestion by fellow writer James McGuiness, and went through numerous plot and character permutations during the years of the Great Depression.
''Mildred Pierce'' is the third of his four novels in which Cain incorporated
Grand opera
Grand opera is a genre of 19th-century opera generally in four or five acts, characterized by large-scale casts and orchestras, and (in their original productions) lavish and spectacular design and stage effects, normally with plots based on o ...
, for which he had trained as a baritone in his youth.
Kate Cummings, mother of Hollywood actress
Constance Cummings
Constance Cummings CBE (May 15, 1910 – November 23, 2005) was an American-British actress with a career spanning over 50 years.
Early life
Cummings was born in Seattle, Washington, the only daughter and younger child of Kate Logan (née Cu ...
, became a friend, a lover and a literary advisor to Cain during the writing of ''Mildred Pierce''. Their relationship ended in 1943, in part due to Cain’s heavy drinking. Cummings provided Cain with insights essential to the development of his female protagonists in ''Mildred Pierce''. Cain freely acknowledged that Cummings “saw me through” the writing of his “first serious novel.”
By November 1941 Cain had completed two-thirds of the novel, but was struggling with adapting to writing in the third-person, his first effort in that narrative form. Cain wrote publisher
Blanche Knopf
Blanche Wolf Knopf (July 30, 1894 – June 4, 1966) was the president of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf Sr., with whom she established the firm in 1915. Blanche traveled the world seeking new authors and was especia ...
in 1940:
The novel required four rewrites before Cain completed ''Mildred Pierce'' in the Spring of 1941 and sold it to Alfred A. Knopf publishers on a $5000 advance.
Critical response
''Mildred Pierce'' was released in September 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf publishers, Literary critic
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson Jr. (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972) was an American writer and literary critic who explored Freudian and Marxist themes. He influenced many American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose unfinished work he edited for publi ...
introduced the novel in an essay for
The New Republic
''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hum ...
entitled “The Boys in the Back Room.” Biographer Ray Hoopes observed that Wilson’s measured praise “was the first suggestion by a major American critic that Cain had edged his way into the front ranks of American authors.”
Cain's unsavory characterizations of Mildred and Veda were controversial, but the novel’s plot lacked the sensational devices that many of his fans anticipated. Retail Bookseller predicted that “James Cain fans are likely to find ''Mildred Pierce'' decidedly mild and tame.” Reviews of ''Mildred Pierce'' were mixed, but on the whole favorable. Never a best-seller, first editions had sold 11,000 hard-cover copies which quickly increased to 14,000 after several weeks. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in reprint by 1945,
Theme
The theme of the novel derives from Cain’s female protagonist, Mildred Pierce, a housewife who “uses men to gain her ends”, in achieving financial success as a restaurateur. Mildred’s daughter Veda, in turn, manipulates her mother to advance her musical ambitions. The elements of “food, finance and mothering” appear forcefully, as they did in earlier works, especially Cain’s 1937 novel
Serenade
In music, a serenade (; also sometimes called a serenata, from the Italian) is a musical composition or performance delivered in honor of someone or something. Serenades are typically calm, light pieces of music. The term comes from the Italian w ...
.
The social and economic hardships of the depression era are co-mingled with Cain’s “obsessive concern with power within heterosexual relationships.” Though never a “social” novelist in the tradition of
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (; August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm mora ...
, Cain’s descriptions of the working class experience are “bitter, incisive and unquestionably authentic.” Critic Paul Skenazy writes:
Cain signaled his intention to treat the larger social landscape of the period when he chose to write Mildred Pierce in the
third-person “as against the narrowly defined
first-person focused on erotic obsessiveness…” This point-of-view allowed the author to more convincingly “convey a sense of a woman’s perspective.” Biographer David Madden observes:
Adaptations
1945 film adaption
Cain was first approached about a film adaptation of ''Mildred Pierce'' by
Warner Brothers
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American Film studio, film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, Califo ...
producer
Jerry Wald
Jerome Irving Wald (September 16, 1911 – July 13, 1962) was an American screenwriter and a producer of films and radio programs.
Life and career Early life
Born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, he had a brother and sons who were act ...
in 1943. Though Cain declined Wald’s request to write a film treatment, Wald—known as a producer of films appealing to women moviegoers—continued to seek a suitable screenwriter. In the spring of 1944, Warners purchased the film rights for $15,000,
When Cain received Wald’s proposed treatments, the producer had inserted a murder into the story, and according to Cain, had failed to emphasize the dramatic implications “of having a big coloratura soprano in the family.” When filmmaker
Michael Curtiz
Michael Curtiz ( ; born Manó Kaminer; since 1905 Mihály Kertész; hu, Kertész Mihály; December 24, 1886 April 10, 1962) was a Hungarian-American film director, recognized as one of the most prolific directors in history. He directed cla ...
was enlisted to direct ''Mildred Pierce'', Cain urged him to avoid introducing hard-boiled themes and rather emphasize the novel’s “wider implication… Mildred Pierce is one woman’s struggle against a great social injustice—which is the mother’s necessity to support her children even though husband and community give her not the slightest assistance.” Literary critic Paul Skenazy notes the impact that Cain’s novels had on 1940s filmmaking in America:
The film was a box-office success. According to Warner Bros., it earned $3,483,000 in the U.S. and $2,155,000 in other markets.
[Hoopes, 1982 p.351-352: See here for conflicts on set between Curtiz and Crawford.]
Other adaptions
1954: An hour-long radio play of the novel was first broadcast by the
Lux Radio Theatre
''Lux Radio Theatre'', sometimes spelled ''Lux Radio Theater'', a classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network (1934–35) (owned by the National Broadcasting Company, later predecessor of American Broadcasting Company ...
on the
NBC Radio Network
The NBC, National Broadcasting Company's NBC Radio Network (known as the NBC Red Network prior to 1942) was an American commercial radio network which was in operation from 1926 through 2004. Along with the Blue Network, NBC Blue Network it was ...
on 14th June 1954 starring
Zachary Scott
Zachary Scott (February 21, 1914 – October 3, 1965)Obituary ''Variety'', October 6, 1965. was an American actor who was known for his roles as villains and "mystery men".
Early life
Scott was born in Austin, Texas, the son of Sallie Le ...
(also in the 1945 film) and
Claire Trevor
Claire Trevor ( Wemlinger; March 8, 1910April 8, 2000) was an American actress. She appeared in 65 feature films from 1933 to 1982, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in ''Key Largo'' (1948), and received nomina ...
.
1993: A 90-minute dramatization by John Fletcher for the Radio Noir series for Saturday Night Theatre on BBC Radio 4 was first broadcast on 26th June 1993.
Shelley Thompson
Shelley Thompson (born March 9, 1959) is a Canadian actress. She is best known for her character Barbara Lahey on the hit mockumentary program ''Trailer Park Boys''.
Biography
Born in Calgary, Alberta, Shelley trained at RADA in London and w ...
played the title role with
Martin Jarvis as Monte Beragon and
Ed Bishop
George Victor Bishop (11 June 1932 – 8 June 2005), known professionally as Ed Bishop or sometimes Edward Bishop, was an American actor. He was known for playing Commander Ed Straker in ''UFO'', Captain Blue in ''Captain Scarlet and the Myste ...
as Bert Pierce.
2011: Director
Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes (; born January 2, 1961) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. His films span four decades with themes examining the personalities of well-known musicians, dysfunctional and dystopian societies, and blurred gender ...
filmed a five-part miniseries for television, with
Kate Winslet
Kate Elizabeth Winslet (; born 5 October 1975) is an English actress. Known for her work in independent films, particularly period dramas, and for her portrayals of headstrong and complicated women, she has received numerous accolades, incl ...
as Mildred,
Guy Pearce
Guy Edward Pearce (born 5 October 1967) is an Australian actor. Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire in England, and raised in Geelong, Victoria (Australia), Victoria in Australia, he started his career portraying Mike Young (Neighbours), Mike Young in ...
as Monty Beragon, and
Evan Rachel Wood
Evan Rachel Wood (born September 7, 1987) is an American actress and activist. She is the recipient of a Critics' Choice Television Award as well as three Primetime Emmy Award nominations and three Golden Globe Award nominations for her work in ...
as Veda, in Spring 2010 (with Morgan Turner as the young Veda). Haynes wrote the script with
Jon Raymond
Jonathan Raymond is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for writing the novels ''The Half-Life'' and ''Rain Dragon'', and for writing the short stories and novels adapted for the films ''Old Joy'', ''Wendy and Lucy'', ...
and served as an executive producer with Pamela Koffler, John Wells, Ilene S. Landress, and
Christine Vachon
Christine Vachon (; born November 21, 1962) is an American film producer active in the American independent film sector.
Christine Vachon produced Todd Haynes' first feature, ''Poison'', which was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundan ...
, along with HBO in association with
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by amazon (company), Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded o ...
.
The miniseries aired on HBO, starting on March 27, 2011, and ending with a two-part finale on April 10, 2011. Unlike the movie version, it is almost a word-for-word dramatization of the novel, including nearly every scene and using Cain's dialogue. It features period music performed by
Vince Giordano
Vince Giordano (born March 11, 1952 in Brooklyn) is an American saxophonist and leader of the New York-based Nighthawks Orchestra. He specializes in jazz of the 1920s and 1930s and his primary instrument is the bass saxophone. Vince Giordano and ...
and the
Nighthawks Orchestra
Nighthawks Orchestra is a New York-based musical group, led by music historian Vince Giordano, that concentrates on recreations of the hot jazz and dance music styles of the period between 1919 and the mid-1930s.
Recordings by the Nighthawks Or ...
.
See also
*
1941 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1941.
Events
* January 3 – A decree (''Normalschrifterlaß'') issued in Nazi Germany by Martin Bormann on behalf of Adolf Hitler calls for replacement of blackl ...
Footnotes
Sources
*
Als, Hilton..2011.''This woman's work: James M. Cain on the grass widow.'' The New Yorker. (21 March 2011). Retrieved 12 May, 2022 from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/28/this-womans-work
*
Byrne, Paul. 2011. ''Spoilt''. The Herald. (20 June 2011) Retrieved 12 May 2022 from: https://www.independent.ie/regionals/herald/entertainment/tv-radio/spoilt-27982804.html
*Glancy, Mark H. 1995. ''Warner Bros Film Grosses, 1921–51: The William Shaefer Ledger''. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 15: 26. doi:10.1080/01439689508604551.
*
Hoopes, Roy. 1982. ''Cain.'' Holt, Reinhart and Winston. New York.
*
Madden, David. 1970. ''James M. Cain''. Twayne Publishers, Inc. Library Catalog Card Number: 78-120011.
*Skenazy, Paul. 1989. James M. Cain. Continuum Publishing Company. New York.
{{James M. Cain
1941 American novels
Alfred A. Knopf books
American crime novels
American novels adapted into films
Glendale, California
Novels adapted into radio programs
American novels adapted into television shows
Novels by James M. Cain
Novels set in California
Hardboiled crime novels