Skip to main content

Mildred Pierce: A Thanksgiving Thought



Image result for mildred pierce hbo cast

On my mind today is Mildred Pierce, a 1941 novel by James Cain, set in the ten years leading up to the date of publication.

No, I didn't just refer to the movie star best known for playing Sonny Corleone. That's James Caan. I'm thinking now of the   novelist James Cain, born in 1892. Although his reputation is in eclipse now, he was quite well known for a time as a writer of "hardboiiled" crime fiction, a peer of Chandler or Hammett. Cain wrote Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice., both memorably adapted into classic Hollywood films. Mildred Pierce was somewhat different, an effort at offering a naturalistic portrait of southern California suburbia.

Anyway, Mildred Pierce was also made into a movie in 1945, and became a television miniseries in 2011.

The title character has two daughters: Veda (11 years old when the story begins in 1931) and her little sister Ray (7 years). The photo above is of Veda, as portrayed by actress Morgan Turner in an HBO miniseries.

The following two-word sentence is not much of a spoiler, by the way, because it happens quite early in the plot, and sets up the rest: Ray dies.

Indeed, that's why I'm thinking of the book right now. Thanksgiving as currently practiced in the US has a lot to do with the sentimentalization of the nuclear family, and Mildred Pierce has a lot, in turn, to do with that.

Pierce kills off Ray because she is the kind of beloved-and-vulnerable little girl who is brought into literary existence precisely in order to be bumped off. She is Beth from Little Women, or Dickens' Little Nell, or so many others.

And the scene reminds me also of something Oscar Wilde said, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more