Mildred Pierce

“He's got the same character they've all got, no better and no worse. But—if you bought his dinner, and cooked it for him the way only you can cook, and you just happened to look cute in that little apron, and something just happened to happen, then it's Nature.”

Lucy Gessler gives advice to Mildred before her first date after Bert leaves her. Lucy describes dating as a financial transaction, encouraging Mildred to put Wally in debt by providing a meal for him; Lucy implies that a sexual encounter would make his indebtedness that much greater. Lucy has an extremely low opinion of men, advocating for a battle of the sexes approach to relationships.

“It was her first experience with the sexological advertiser, though she was to find out he was fairly common. Usually he was some phony calling himself a writer, an agent, or a talent scout, who found out that for a dollar and a half's worth of newspaper space he could have a daylong procession of girls at his door, all desperate for work, all willing to do almost anything to get it.”

While she is struggling to find work, Mildred goes on a sketchy job interview with a man who only wants to proposition her for sex. She discovers that men preying on desperate women are quite common—and, arguably, she will later fall for a different kind of predator in Monty. This passage builds upon the theme that men objectify women to fulfill their own desires. Few worthwhile, genuinely caring men emerge in the narrative to counter this unflattering portrayal.

“I don't want you to go home thinking there's any hope. There isn't. In this store, we've taken on just two people in the last three months […] We see everybody that comes in, partly because we think we ought to, partly because we don't want to close up the department all together. There just aren't any jobs, here or in the other stores either. I know I'm making you feel bad, but I don't want you to be—kidded.”

Mrs. Boole, the personnel director of a large Los Angeles department store, breaks the bad news to Mildred; however, by the time Mildred gets home, she has a telegram from Mrs. Boole that a job is available—a lowly waitress job that Mildred turns down, much to Mrs. Boole’s irritation. Mrs. Boole is an ambiguous figure. She shows kindness to Mildred and pities her after Mildred opens up about her woes; however, Mrs. Boole also kisses Mildred goodbye, possibly implying a sexual interest that Mildred does not reciprocate.

“Baby, you're nuts. Those tips will bring in a couple of dollars a day, and you'll be making—why, at least $20 a week, more money than you’ve seen since Pierce Homes blew up. You've got to do it, for your own sake. Nobody pays any attention to that uniform stuff anymore. I'll bet you look cute in one.”

Lucy Gessler, Mildred’s neighbor and confidant, consoles Mildred after her first shift as a waitress. Lucy is a realist; she wants Mildred to accept her temporary hardships with grace and to be kind to herself while making unpleasant compromises. When Lucy finds out that Mildred has taken a job as a waitress, having first assumed she was resorting to prostitution, Lucy is delighted.

“The car was pumping something into her veins, something of pride, of arrogance, of regained self-respect, that no talk, no liquor, no love, could possibly give. Once more she felt like herself, and began thinking about the job with cool detachment, instead of shame.”

After she tricks her estranged husband, Bert, out of his car keys, taking the car because she needs it for work, Mildred speeds down Colorado Avenue in Los Angeles. Having the independence of the automobile fills her with a renewed confidence she lost in her long efforts to find a job. As her self-assurance returns, her problems diminish in importance and solutions materialize.

“She had a talent for quiet flirtation, but found that this didn't pay. Serving a man food, apparently, was in itself an ancient intimacy; going beyond it made him uncomfortable, and sounded a trivial note and what was essentially a solemn relationship. Simple friendliness, coupled with exact attention to his wants, seem to please him most, and on that basis she had frequent invitations to take a ride, have dinner, or see a show. […] Having her leg felt, it turned out, was practically a daily hazard, and she found this best not to notice. Even a leg feeler, if properly handled, could be nursed into a regular who left good tips, no doubt to prove he really had a heart of gold.”

Mildred conquers her position as a waitress in Mr. Chris’s restaurant, quickly learning how to cultivate customers who leave better tips and tolerate predators. Her prompt, accurate service is a reaction to her negative opinion about the restaurant and her co-workers. This passage also reaffirms the novel’s jaundiced view of men as single-minded louts who are at best a necessary evil in the lives of women.

“To this not unflattering harangue Mr. Chris at first returned a blank stare. Then he burst into loud laughter, and pointed a derisive finger at Ida, as though it was a great joke on her. Ida professed to be highly indignant, that he would ‘let her go on like that’ when he knew about Mildred's pies all the time, and had already made up his mind to take them. The more she talked the louder he laughed, and then, after he wiped his streaming eyes, the bargain was struck. There was a little difficulty about price, he trying to beat Mildred down to thirty cents, but she held out for thirty-five, and presently he agreed.”

This is the culmination of a carefully choreographed plot between Mildred, restaurant hostess Ida, and another server named Anna to make manager Mr. Chris think selling Mildred’s pies in the restaurant was his idea. Excited to take credit for success, Mr. Chris immediately plays along. The episode reinforces the novel’s extremely negative stereotypes of men—that they demand power while lacking the intellect or skills to wield it, making them easy to manipulate. 

“She couldn't break Veda, no matter how much she beat her. Veda got victory out of these struggles, she a trembling, ignoble defeat. It always came back to the same thing. She was afraid of Veda, of her snobbery, her contempt, her unbreakable spirit. And she was afraid of something that seemed always lurking under Veda’s bland, phony toniness: a cold, cruel, course desire to torture her mother, to humiliate her, above everything else, to hurt her. Mildred apparently yearned for warm affection from this child, such as Bert apparently commanded. But all she ever got was a stagey, affected counterfeit.”

Mildred and Veda have a deeply dysfunctional relationship based on an almost sadomasochistic dynamic. Mildred, desperate to hang on to parental power, resorts to violence. But beating Veda, unsurprisingly, does little to cultivate “warm affection”—instead, Veda does her best to hurt her mother, lashing out through snobbery, coldness, and contempt. Despite this mutual aggression, Mildred continues to long for her daughter’s love, which Veda will never give.

“he can't hold out very long. For one thing, there's the Biederhof. She won't like it when she finds out you ask for divorce and he wouldn't give it to you. She's going to wonder if he really loves her—though how anybody could love her is beyond me. And all the time, he's got it staring him in the face that the harder he makes it for you the harder he's making it for the kids. And Bert loves those kids, too.’’

After Mildred tells Bert she wants a divorce and he refuses, Lucy Gessler, Mildred’s next-door neighbor and champion, explains to Mildred how to make Bert come around. As always, Lucy understands Bert’s motivations and correctly predicts his reactions—she is a student of men and knows what makes each of them tick. After Mildred implements Lucy’s pie plan, Bert agrees to the divorce, giving her the house in the bargain and allowing her to charge him with cruelty so she will have legal grounds for the divorce.

“‘Your daughter Ray. She's got the flu, and they've taken her to a hospital, and—’ […] Mildred dashed into the house and back to the den, snapping on lights as she went. As she picked up the phone a horrible feeling came over her that God had had her number, after all.”

Mildred’s two-day stay at Lake Arrowhead with her new boyfriend Monty is her first carefree weekend as a single mother. She is also on top of the world because her new restaurant is about to open. However, immediately on coming home, she learns that her daughter is gravely ill. Mildred perceives this as divine judgment for having thoroughly enjoyed herself—punishment for sexual desire and pleasure.

“All next day she had an unreasoning, hysterical sense of being deprived of something her whole nature craved: the right to sit with her child, to be near it when it needed her. And yet the best she could manage was a few minutes in the morning, an hour after supper. She got to the hospital early, and wasn't at all reassured by the nurses' cheery talk. And her heart contracted when she saw Ray, all her bubbly animation gone, her face flushed, her breathing labored. But she couldn't stay. She had to go, to deliver pies, to pay off painters, to check on announcements, to contract for chickens, to make more pies.”

Mildred is torn between caring for her child and meeting her business obligations. Ray’s serious illness—she has what the novel calls “grippe,” an archaic word for influenza. Mildred’s sense that she is neglecting her maternal duty prevents her from being excited about the opening of her new restaurant. Cain is describing a fairly unusual situation in 1941—a woman going into business for herself and feeling torn between work concerns and caring for her family—to explore how a narrative typical for male characters might fit a female protagonist.

“Then together, in the darkened room, they mourned their child. When he could speak, he babbled of Ray’s sweet, perfect character. […] Mildred knew this was a solace from the pain too great for him to bear: that he was taking refuge in the belief she wasn't really dead. Too realistic, too literal-minded, to be stirred much by the idea of heaven, she nevertheless craved relief from this aching void inside of her, and little heat lightnings began to shoot through it. They had an implication that terrified her, and she fought them off.”

After Ray’s sudden death, Mildred proves more capable of dealing with loss than Bert. Despite her grief, Mildred never lies to herself about what she is experiencing—with disquiet, but without the self-delusion that marks Bert’s response to any setback, Mildred acknowledges that the “heat lightnings” she is feeling are her relief that is was Ray and not Veda that died.

“she knew that her machine was stalled, that her kitchen was swamped, that she had completely lost track of her orders, that not even a starter was moving. For one dreadful moment she saw her opening turning into a fiasco, everything she had hoped for slipping away from her in one nightmare of an evening. Then beside her was Ida, whipping off her hat, tucking it with her handbag, beside the tin box that held the cash, slipping into an apron.”

No matter how thoroughly Mildred prepares for the opening of her restaurant’s first night, disaster still threatens to strike: The advance advertising is so successful that the staff is quickly overwhelmed, which is seemingly a good problem until it becomes a terrible one. Luckily, Mildred is saved by her old superior, Ida, who takes over the kitchen and keeps it from falling behind. The passage draws a distinction between the helpful and unhelpful people in Mildred’s life. The first thing Ida does, even before coming into the kitchen, is tell Bert and Veda to leave. The helpers who remain are all trustworthy and caring.

“Veda bawled, and she was still bawling when they got in the car and started home. […] Then, in explosive jerks, Veda just started to talk. ‘Oh mother—I was so afraid—he wouldn't take me. And then—he wanted me. He said I had something—in my head! Mother—in my head!’ Then Mildred knew that an awakening had taken place in Veda, that it wasn't in the least phony, and that what had happened was precisely what she herself had mutedly believed in all these years. It was as though the Star of Bethlehem that suddenly appeared in front of her.”

During Veda’s initial meeting with her new music teacher, impresario Charlie Hannen, he reacted to her audition with some praise and extremely harsh criticism. Mildred assumes that Veda is crying because of the critique, but the negative statements simply roll off Veda’s back—she is as ever impervious to disapproval. Instead, Veda sees in Hannen’s scant admiration a pathway to a musical future with the sort of potential to which she has believed all her life that she is entitled. For Mildred, this is the potential awakening of a new sense of humanity in Veda that she had always hoped would occur.

“presently the thing became so public, what with pieces in the paper about the sale of his polo ponies, the disappearance of the Cord in favor of a battered little Chevrolet, and one thing and another, that he did begin to talk about it. But he always acted as though this were some casual thing that would be settled shortly, a nuisance while it lasted, but of no real importance. Never once did he let Mildred come close to him in connection with it, pat him on the head, tell him it really didn't matter, or do any of the things that in her scheme of life a woman was expected to do under the circumstances. She felt sorry for him, terribly upset about him. And yet she also felt snubbed and rebuffed. And that she could never shake off the feeling that if he accepted her as his social equal he would act differently about it.”

This passage follows Veda’s energetic description to Mildred of the formerly rich Monty’s financial losses. This setback reveals how little emotional intimacy or intellectual sharing there is in Monty and Mildred’s relationship to accompany their sexual attraction. Monty ensures that Mildred perpetually feels socially beneath him and his old-money family, while flaunting his inappropriately intimate connection with Veda, whom he treats as an equal and part of the elite.

“Mildred got up, took careful aim, and slapped Veda hard, on the cheek. The next thing she knew, […] Veda had slapped her back. Blowing smoke in Mildred's face, Veda went on, in her cool, insolent tone: ‘Glendale California, land where the orange tree blows, from Mignon by Ambroise Thomas, eighteen eleven—eighteen ninety-six. Forty square miles of nothing whatever. A high-class, positively-restricted development for discriminating people that run filling stations, and furniture factories, and markets, and pie wagons. The garden spot of the world—in the pig's eye. A wormhole, for grubs’!”

In this famous passage, Veda insults everything about Glendale’s inability to live up to California’s propaganda about itself. Upset that her mother did not give her a grand piano for Christmas, Veda lays bare her ambitions to transcend the milieu into which she has been born, scornfully dismissing their neighbors as blue-collar workers that mistake the “wormhole” where they live for a “garden spot.” Veda is parroting what she’s heard from Monty, whose snobbery and classist bias she has thoroughly internalized. Mildred turns the tables by explaining that she has been paying Monty’s way for months, realizing that she must end things with Monty once and for all.

“Mildred worked from sunup, when her marketing started, until long after dark; she worked so hard she began to feel driven, and relieved herself of every detail she could possibly assign to others. She continued to gain weight. There was still something voluptuous about her figure, but it was distinctly plump. Her face was losing such little color as it had, and she no longer seemed younger than her years. In fact, she was beginning to look matronly. […] she engaged the driver named Tommy […] When Veda first saw him and his regalia she didn't kiss him, as she had kissed a car. She gave her mother a long, thoughtful look, full of something almost describable as respect.”

Mildred bountiful energy goes into running her burgeoning business interests. Her newfound power means she can delegate responsibility, allowing her to maintain active control of four profitable enterprises. But because she is a woman, Cain lingers not on the incredible ingenuity required for her success, but instead on the effect her work is having on her appearance. No matter how much she achieves in the world of work, Mildred is still judged on her looks. Cain’s reference to Veda suddenly showing respect for her mother relates back to Veda’s desire to be waited upon by servants, specifically when she made Letty, the hired babysitter, wear a uniform. Veda senses her mother stepping up the ladder of social class.

“If you go to the sheriff's office, they'll bring young Mr. Forrester back. And if they bring him back, he'll want to marry me, and that doesn't happen to suit me. It may interest you to know that he's been back. He sneaked into town, twice, and a beautiful time I had of it, getting him to be a nice boy and stay where Mama put him. He's quite crazy about me. I saw to that. But as for matrimony, I beg to be excused. I'd much rather have the money.”

Believing that 17-year-old Veda is pregnant, Mildred wants to go to the police to have Sam Forrester, the ostensible father, arrested. When Veda stops Mildred and tells her that she has no intention of marrying Sam, Mildred realizes Veda is not pregnant and is just blackmailing Sam’s moneyed family. When Mildred challenges the morality of this, Veda says she is just following Mildred’s example: Mildred was also 17 and pregnant when she married Bert, so Veda accuses Mildred of getting pregnant on purpose so she could marry for money.

“Well, since you asked, with enough money, I can get away from you, you poor, half-witted mope. From you, and your pie wagon, and your chickens, and your waffles, and your kitchens, and everything that smells of grease. And from this shack, that you blackmailed out of my father with your threats about the Biederhof, and its neat little two car garage, and its lousy furniture. And from Glendale, and its dollar days, and its furniture factories, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear smocks. From every rotten, stinking thing that even reminds me of the place—or you.”

Veda unloads her vitriolic opinions about her mother’s entrepreneurial success when Mildred reacts negatively to Veda’s plan to blackmail the Forrester family. Mildred is appalled that Veda would stoop to this kind of crime, when Mildred thinks she has always given her everything Veda ever wanted. But Veda isn’t satisfied with a middle-class existence; she has bought into Monty’s ideas about class—only being landed gentry and never having to work for a living will do. Veda’s words indicate that she ascribes to others the same jaundiced outlook—she accuses her mother of having “blackmailed out of my father” the house Veda hates.

“Mr. Treviso stepped nearer, to make his meaning clear. ‘Da girl is lousy. She is a b****. Da singer—is not. […] You come in ‘ere, you try to make me play a little part, part in intrigue to get your daughter back— […] For last two weeks, ever since Snack-O-Ham broadcast, dees little b**** ’ave told me a poor dumb mother will try to get ’er back, and the first t’ing she do is come here, offer pay for singing lessons.’”

After hearing Veda’s magnificent performance on the popular Snack-O-Ham radio show—the first time Mildred ever heard her sing—she becomes determined to win Veda back. Once she finds out that Veda is training with Carlo Treviso, Mildred asks to pay for Veda’s music lessons. Carlo tells Mildred that Veda is a coloratura soprano, a rare vocal range, but explains that Veda also has a coloratura’s raging temperament and self-absorbed personality—his language is so shocking that the novel censors his expletives about Veda.

“the lights went up all over the first floor, and the door, as though of its own accord, swung open, wide open. Then, from somewhere within, a voice, the only voice in the world to Mildred, began to sing. After a long time Mildred heard a piano, realized Veda was singing the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin. ‘Here comes the bride,’ sang Veda, but ‘comes’ was hardly the word. Mildred floated in, seeing faces, flowers, dinner coats, paper hats, hearing laughter, applause, greetings, as things in a dream. When Veda, still singing, came over, took her in her arms, and kissed her, it was almost more than she could stand, and she stumbled hurriedly out, and let Monty take her upstairs, on the pretext that she must put on a suitable dress for the occasion.”

Mildred’s elaborate plan to win Veda back—marrying Monty, fixing up his mansion, and bankrolling his lavish lifestyle to attract Veda—seems to have failed, so when Veda, Monty, and many other friends and relatives throw a massive surprise party at Mildred’s new home, Mildred is overcome with happiness and delight. It is everything she’s ever wanted: closeness with her daughter. Of course, unbeknownst to Mildred, Veda is only using Mildred to start an affair with Monty and avoid paying for her own lifestyle.

“There came a tap on her shoulder, and Mr. Pierce was handing her a pair of opera glasses. Eagerly she took them, adjusted them, leveled them at Veda. But after a few moments she put them down. Up close, she could see the wan, stagey look that Veda turned on the audience, and the sharp, cold, look that she constantly shot at Mr. Treviso, particularly when there was a break, and she was waiting to come in. It shattered the illusion for Mildred. She preferred to remain at a distance, to enjoy this child as she seemed, rather than as she was.”

While Mildred watches Veda perform a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, she suddenly sees her daughter for the cold, calculating narcissist that Veda is. Though this is the grandest stage upon which Vega has ever performed and, for Mildred, a fulfillment she had always hoped might happen, a closer look at Veda reveals her true, underlying nature of haughtiness and pretense. Though Mildred typically does not lie to herself or make self-delusion a habit, as with everything to do with Veda, Mildred chooses to retreat into Veda’s phony pleasantness.

“she was about to apologize and go back to her room when she became aware of Monty's arm. He was leaning on it, but it was across the door in a curious way, as though to bar her from the room. Her hand, which was resting on the door casing, slipped up, flipped the light switch. Veda was looking at her, from the bed.”

After Mildred returns from meeting with a group of angry creditors and a strategy session with Bert about how to best protect Veda’s money, Mildred asks Monty’s help in finding Veda—only to discover that the two are having an affair. When she is discovered, Veda is unconcerned. Ostentatiously, she stands naked from the bed, approaches a full-length mirror, and Narcissus-like stares at her reflecting while combing her hair. Furious and as always desperate to get some kind of reaction from her daughter through violence, Mildred tackles and chokes her.