"The Lamp in Mildred's Living Room": Cain's Mildred Pierce and Veblen's Conspicuous Consumption

James M. Cain's fourth novel, published in 1941, has created difficulties for critics and readers from the start. 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. 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. 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. 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. (1) 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. (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. 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. (3) Here, I argue that Mildred Pierce should be read as a pointed, informed social critique. With this novel, Cain points to the alienation that results from a society he understands to be increasingly driven by a dangerous conspicuous consumption. As twentieth-century capitalism moved away from notions of production to meet scarcity or need, it engendered a new American consumption in which one's sense of self and purpose is tied to what one buys. Cain asks the reader of Mildred Pierce to confront a culture in which the real of production is giving way to self-marketing through consumption. That this critique has so often been missed--both by readers of the novel and now by recent viewers of the Haynes miniseries--might suggest a flaw in the text. But we must recognize that it is our own cultural blind-spots, our own continuing, and increasing, imbrication in a culture of consumption that has made Mildred Pierce's ideological investments hard to see. This discussion is thus meant to raise questions about the difficulty of producing or receiving effective critique from within a culture of consumption; particularly, how can the viewer of Haynes's miniseries come to terms with this social critique when that viewer has become even more imbricated in consumption's construction of subjectivities than would have been thought possible in Cain's time? Some of the most recent literary criticism of Mildred Pierce comes from Robert Dingley, Donna Campbell, Catherine Jurca, and Leonard Cassuto. While these critics do not understand Cain's Mildred Pierce to make the strong social critique I argue for here, each shares my interest in seeing Cain's work reflect a changing twentieth-century economy. (4) Dingley's essay, to which I will return later, considers what Cain's novels say about American production, particularly the production of food. The others explore the novel in the context of Depression economics, and each notes something different about the means through which the character of Mildred is shaped by these large forces. …