With this novel, Cain points to the alienation that results from a society he understands to be increasingly driven by a dangerous conspicuous consumption. Here, I argue that Mildred Pierce should be read as a pointed, informed social critique.
But interestingly enough, reviews of the miniseries in the popular press mirror traditional critical responses to the novel, suggesting that the difficulties readers have had knowing what to make of Mildred Pierce in the past continue into the present. (2) While it has often been easy enough to dismiss Cain and to never fully understand this American novel, Haynes's return to it at this particular cultural moment pushes us to reconsider it. These mixed critical reactions to Cain's work-and the more particular difficulty readers have had coming to terms with Mildred Pierce-become again important critical questions with well-regarded filmmaker Todd Haynes drawing popular attention to the novel by adapting it, quite faithfully, into an award-winning 2011 HBO miniseries. Cain's literary fortunes have risen and fallen over the years as literary critics have, at times, seen him as merely a popular writer who capitalized on sensational topics and, at other times, understood him to be an important American novelist. In fact, the desire to fit Cain's work into the mold of his first novels was so strong that the 1945 film Mildred Pierce starring Joan Crawford was revised to better resemble them: the film's murder plot and first-person confession are not part of the novel, and this film, like the adaptations of the two earlier novels, also meets the generic requirements of film noir.
Mildred Pierce, the third-person narration of a housewife who gets rich by starting her own restaurant business, seems out of keeping with the thematic and stylistic concerns of these other two works. Cain is best known as the author of crime fiction classics, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, both of which-with their gritty, first-person narrators-became films that helped found the genre of film noir. Cain's fourth novel, published in 1941, has created difficulties for critics and readers from the start.
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