Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

intensifies all her efforts, even sacrifices herself, so that Veda can get have everything she
has always desired.
This Cain novel is intriguing and well-structured with a twist at the end, and
demands a particular reading of gender issues inherent in classic American film noir.
Unusually for noir films, the main protagonist of Mildred Pierce is female, but classically
she is nearly destroyed by a femme fatale – her own daughter. The film tries to re-establish
masculine authority (one should not ignore that, when the film was released in 1945, the
American troops were coming back home from the war) after a time when women were
economically emancipated and running many of the businesses in the country. Many
consider, as I do, that the novel manages to be more sinister (and more convoluted) than
the film, and this is also made evident by the type of direct, tough-minded language Cain
uses and the power of his writing.
This is perhaps the reason why James M. Cain was nicknamed the leader of the
“poets of tabloid murder” by critics, notably Edmund Wilson, who noted that “Cain
himself is particularly ingenious in tracing from their first beginnings the tangles that
gradually tighten around the necks of the people involved in those bizarre and brutal
crimes that figure in the American papers” (Wilson 1962:21). Yet, Cain’s writing style
shows a different attitude towards life when compared to the other hard-boiled writers. For
one thing, Cain has always disagreed that such a school of writing existed and therefore did
not consider himself a hard-boiled writer.
Also, unlike Hammett, Chandler and Woolrich, Cain did not expand his crime
writing style in the pulp magazines. The characters he created were not persistently tough,
self-assured private detectives, such as Hammett’s Sam Spade or Chandler’s Philip
Marlowe. He rather employed marginal characters that moved about in Los Angeles
always in search of fame and fortune. The narrator of The Postman, Frank Chambers, starts
the novel by saying that “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” so the reader
immediately learns that he is a drifter who has been tossed off a vehicle, only to find out
later that he has arrived at Twin Oaks Tavern, a roadside café, and is being served a huge
breakfast he cannot pay for. So the self-assuredness found in the other hard-boiled writers
is replaced by malevolence and a certain stupidity in Cain’s marginal characters. In short,
both novels - Double Indemnity, and more specifically, The Postman Always Rings Twice –
expose Cain’s penchant for tales of murderous attraction. His characters are often self-
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