The theme of the novel derives from Cain’s female protagonist, Mildred Pierce, a housewife who “uses men to gain her ends”, in achieving financial success as a restaurateur. Mildred’s daughter Veda, in turn, manipulates her mother to advance her musical ambitions. The elements of “food, finance and mothering” appear forcefully, as they did in earlier works, especially Cain’s 1937 novel Serenade.[20][21]
The social and economic hardships of the depression era are co-mingled with Cain’s “obsessive concern with power within heterosexual relationships.” Though never a “social” novelist in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser, Cain’s descriptions of the working class experience are “bitter, incisive and unquestionably authentic.”[22] Critic Paul Skenazy writes:
For Cain, the most impressive elements of the Depression are not alterations in the job market, or class inequities, but the obsession with money that the economic crisis creates, and the way the economic collapse affects relations between the sexes. Because all of the men in the novel are out of work and financially dependent on women, the power structure of personal relations have been inverted.[23]
Cain signaled his intention to treat the larger social landscape of the period when he chose to write Mildred Pierce in the third-person “as against the narrowly defined first-person focused on erotic obsessiveness…” This point-of-view allowed the author to more convincingly “convey a sense of a woman’s perspective.”[24][25] Biographer David Madden observes:
Cain depicts ways in which certain aspects of the American character and the dream produce grotesque women like Veda…in the depression when everything is suddenly taken from her…Veda alone holds on desperately and arrogantly to all the dreams of affluence…she is the flowering of the seed of corruption in the American Dream...[26]
