[1] A story of “social inequity and opportunity in America" set during the Great Depression, Mildred Pierce follows the trajectory of a lower-middle class divorcee with two children in her tragic struggle to achieve financial and personal success.
[4] Set in Glendale, California, 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.
Veda enjoys Mildred's newfound 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.
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 her daughter's assets if they are exposed – Mildred goes to her room to confront her.
The "reconciliation" (which had been accompanied by reporters and photographers) was designed to defuse the negative publicity resulting from their affair, and it emerges the apparent loss of her voice was a ploy so that she could renege on her existing contract and be free to take up a more lucrative one offered by another company.
As Veda leaves the house, a broken Mildred, encouraged by Bert, eventually says "to hell" with her monstrous daughter, and the pair agree to get "stinko" (drunk).
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.
There is no killing, no crime, and no conflicts with the law in the story…the action is not concentrated into a narrow period of time, as in his earlier fiction, but stretches across the Depression...Cain was determined to create a broad social and temporal landscape through third-person reportage, as against the narrowly defined first-person focused on erotic obsessiveness…”[8] Kate Cummings, mother of Hollywood actress Constance Cummings, became a friend, a lover and a literary advisor to Cain during the writing of Mildred Pierce.
[17] Mildred Pierce was released in September 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf publishers, Literary critic Edmund Wilson introduced the novel in an essay for The New Republic 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.
[19] 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.
[23]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.”[24][25] Biographer David Madden observes: Cain depicts ways in which certain aspects of the American character and the dream produce grotesque women like Veda…in the depression when everything is suddenly taken from her…Veda alone holds on desperately and arrogantly to all the dreams of affluence…she is the flowering of the seed of corruption in the American Dream...[26]Cain was first approached about a film adaptation of Mildred Pierce by Warner Brothers producer Jerry Wald in 1943.
Haynes wrote the script with Jon Raymond and served as an executive producer with Pamela Koffler, John Wells, Ilene S. Landress, and Christine Vachon, along with HBO in association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.