"Oh, Lottie": Race in Mildred Pierce

Mildred (right) with daughter and the film's femme fatale Veda (left).

Mildred Pierce is one of my favourite classic Hollywood films. There is something about the film's blending of post-war fragility and 21st century modernity that makes it a uniquely timeless film. Mildred remains so good to think about when charting the history of class, gender and social structure in American society and these representations in Hollywood.

In a flurry of supposed agency, title character Mildred casts off her former motherly domesticity and becomes empoweringly entrepreneurial. She grows rapidly into a wildly successful restauranteur as her resourcefulness in the home translates into profitable enterprise, though her success is couched within a desperate attempt to satisfy an insatiable daughter and social pressures that seek to return her to the home and to the husband. (Which she does, much to the film's applause.)

For our purposes, we must look to race. In Mildred Pierce, the most damning statement about race is not what is shown, but rather, what is not shown. Notions of race – other than white – is distinctly and consciously absent from the film. The only non-white character in Mildred is the housekeeper Lottie.

Lottie (left) making pies with title character, Mildred (right).

Lottie, for all the screen-time she gets (which I vaguely guesstimate to be around a maximum of five minutes, total), is portrayed as a bumbling, impressionable fool. She is totally deferential to her employer and title character, Mildred. Her high-pitched, over-stretched voice posits her as no smarter than a toddler: at one point she is shown to be unable to operate a telephone. The character is highly stylised on DelGaudio's 'mammy' stereotype: a most persisting image perpetuated by Hollywood productions. She is "inexorably linked to ... the slave-society image of surrogate maternalism and domestic service" while being resigned to the "customary position of socio-economic dependency".

The novel of the same name upon which the film is based makes no mention of Lottie's race or nationality, therefore we may validly assume that this pairing of character and race was a conscious decision reflective of attitudes of the era. Certainly, this description of Lottie's characterisation and racial stereotyping is damning but all too similar to its Hollywood adjuncts. 

Interestingly, the actress that played Lottie, Butterfly McQueen, was uncredited for her role in Mildred Pierce as she was for her role (also as a maid) in Gone With The Wind. McQueen herself gave her view on her recurring characterisation as a bumbling Mammy that, in my view, says more in 3 sentences than I could in a whole blog post.

I didn’t mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over I resented it. I didn’t mind being funny but I didn’t like being stupid.