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Happy Thanksgiving

Image result for mildred pierce hbo cast

On my mind today (and on Thanksgiving fairly often -- I've used this as this blog's Thanksgiving reflection twice before), is the novel Mildred Pierce, published in 1941, written by James Cain, a writer whose reputation, once considerable, has lately gone into eclipse.

 As it happens, Mildred Pierce was also made into a movie in 1945, and became a television miniseries (HBO) 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 that 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.

 I saw the HBO treatment of that death, thought of Little Nell, thought of Oscar Wilde, and laughed. So I gather I don't have a heart of stone.
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