Mildred Pierce

Mildred Pierce

The protagonist of the film Mildred Pierce does everything in her power to help her children. Mildred dreams that one day her daughters will be prima donnas and concert pianists, and pursues these fantasies to the best of her abilities. By twenty-first century standards, she could be considered a good mother--she works as a waitress to make her single mother ends meet and starts her own business. The filmmakers, however, labor to portray her as the a bad mother according to standards in the 1940s: Mildred attempts to shoulder fatherly responsibilities, which makes her the worst kind of mother possible. The matriarchal coup ends in disaster, and reveals the filmmakers' message: a woman's place is in the household, and she cannot hope to thrive in a man's world.

Warner Brothers released the film in 1945, a year many American soldiers returned from World War II. It left millions dead, but the calamitous event also boosted women's place in society. During the WWII period, women became the main providers for their families while American men were at war, a situation that lead to increased independence for American women. Popular slogans and icons of the time, like Rosie the Riveter, encourage women to work and take charge of their lives. However, when men returned and re-entered the workforce, society expected women to step aside and rejoin the cult of domesticity. This background knowledge adds many layers of meaning to the movie and is vital to understanding the message of the movie.

Mildred Pierce is meant for an audience of women. It illustrates why economic independence is undesirable and reinforces why women must stay in the house--Mildred's self-sufficiency only leads to catastrophe. The key to Mildred's failure unfolds in the early kitchen scene of the movie when she walks away from the Pierce marriage by kicking her husband Bert out of the house. Pressing financial problems arise as soon as he leaves because Mildred barely makes enough money to support her children. Much of her heartbreak could have been avoided if she had stayed with Bert, but a streak of independence makes it impossible for her to remain a docile housewife. She does not trust Bert to pull the family out of financial mire. Instead, Mildred decides to take provide and protect her children with her own strengths:

"You might as well get this straight right now, once and for all. Those kids come first in this house, before either one of us. Maybe that's right, an maybe it's wrong, but that's the way it is. I'm determined to do the best I can for them. If I can't do it with you, I'll do it without you."

These lines demonstrate the fundamental errors of Mildred's love for her children: "it's wrong." The love and devotion Mildred should have reserved for Bert were mistakenly given to Veda and Kay. Mildred's pie and cake money goes toward keeping her daughter comfortable. She snubs her husband--she does not hoard any money to buy luxuries for Bert. The sex of Bert's replacements also highlights an important theme of Mildred Pierce. Mildred replaces men with women--she chooses her female daughters over her male husband, which reinforces the idea of a matriarchy. Only Veda and Kay, who are female, can inherit from Mildred. The marriage dissolves on account of the Mildred's unbalanced, smothering, obsessive, insistent maternal love for her female children.

During the argument in the kitchen, Mildred seems justified in letting her husband leave: he does not make any money. Mildred tells Bert that she has daughters to raise and bills to pay, but no money because of Bert. He retorts that he makes enough to get by and counters with his own reasons for the financial troubles, placing the blame squarely on Mildred's shoulders. He "wouldn't have so many bills if [she] didn't try to bring up those kids like their old man was a millionaire. No wonder they're so fresh and stuck-up," Bert argues.

According to Burt, Mildred created this problem and the events that unfold justify his opinions. Veda emerges from her childhood as a femme fatal, a sure sign that something went terribly wrong in her upbringing. The filmmakers imply that if Bert had been around he would have put her in her place. Bert says that he is "so fed up with the way [Veda] high hats" him that he would eventually "cut loose and slap her right in the face." His attitude towards Veda contrasts sharply with Mildred's attitude, but in the end, Mildred hits their daughter first. Although he admits that he does not have the maternal connection that Mildred has with her daughters, he knows that her method of raising the kids "isn't right." These lines are also important because they show that Bert, the patriarch, knows more about being a mother than the Mildred. She is too busy making pies to provide for her children to see what has gone wrong. Interest in business already makes her blind to domestic problems. While the role reversal between Mildred and Bert does not become apparent until the end, a hint of Bert's prediction about Veda shows up in the scenes following his departure. Veda, the next matriarch in the line of inheritance, already tries to control her mother after Wally's visit by trying to trade Mildred's dignity for a new house.

After this, the filmmakers include a string of scenes which seem to empower women. Mildred works her way up the socio-economic ladder. She possesses the traits of the ideal all-American man: hard work, self-reliance, and perseverance. Her labors pay off in the Horatio Alger tradition and she reaps a handsome profit from her chain of restaurants. There are two messages in this sequence of events that contradict the ominous predictions of the kitchen scene--first, her success demonstrates that if women leave their husbands, they are not condemned to lives of poverty and misery. Second, her successes with the restaurants show that women are also capable of being entrepreneurs in the business world. Ida also enters Mildred's world, and becomes another affirmative theme in the film. As the two bond, they create a relationship that is an equitable partnership devoid of the power structure present in Mildred's relationships with men.

These positive elements build audience empathy for Mildred. They celebrate along with Mildred when her restaurant does well and cheer when she opens the new branches of her dinner. The audience becomes Mildred through this empathy and lives through her vicariously. But these positive themes are later used to manipulate the female audience's emotive response. The heroine, who momentarily enjoys business success, is destined to fail as a career woman as