willis lamb's she's come undone

The title She's Come simply means that she has reached the age of majority. Dolores passé, the main character in this novel, has been through a lot of experiences from childhood to adulthood. Hers is a neurological and mental journey from adolescence to adulthood. Many incidents occur that either positively or negatively affect her character. She is portrayed as a trustworthy character from the start, though her acts make it seem as if she has given up at one point. It is a depressing story set in the final days of segregation about a young woman's fight to transcend her ugly background, her responsibilities, and, most importantly, her mother. In the entire narration of the She’ Come Undone, Lamb insists on the significance of psychological, emotional, social and physical change. Dolores has a lot of epiphanies in her entire growth, which includes her discovery that most of her failed relationships are not due to her faults. She comes to realize that she deserves to be loved and due to her traumatic life she can survive on her won by not relying on anybody. With every single traumatic episode she undergoes, she becomes stronger day by day. Therefore, she a little more develops self-love and blames herself a little bit.
As a child Dolores experiences the divorce of her parents, her mum decides to take her to live with her grandma and then her mum dies and as if that is not enough she is raped by the trusted neighbor too. All these explain why she was the character of someone who is very desperate for love and attention. While Dolores seems to impose blames for the happenings in her life onto other people, her mother should bear the most massive portion of that blame. She names her Dolores which means our lady of sorrow and this somehow might have had a negative impact on her life (Lamb 6).
Even though she goes through a lot of pain in her life, she becomes unlikeable and too destructive. She destroys things like when she scribbles on all the faces in expensive storybooks (Lamb 9) and burns bedspreads with a cigarette at Cape Cod. She even kills Dottie's fish knowingly which makes us tend to believe that she is on her irreversible path of becoming a serial killer. You might think she doesn’t know what she is doing, but that is not true as she still says she killed off whatever people (Lamb 16). For some time she remains out of control and doesn’t anything to help herself.
We can attribute all these to the pain and suffering she goes through as a young person. All these become unbearable and lead to her destruction and also a failure to behave normally. She is just a young girl who is affected psychologically by rape alienation and death of her loved one. She doesn’t know what to do and needs help to get out of this. Dolores, her character of meanness, comes out as she calls her mum ugly and she doesn’t have friends at school because of meanness. It is comprehensible because she goes through a lot and she needs something to solace her, and hence she treats anyone as an enemy.
Finally, she starts destroying herself as she burns herself with her hair iron and saying things like they will find me in a pool of blood. She feels so withdrawn and so lonely that she wishes only death can save her from all these sorrow, alienation and psychological torture.
She eats a whole piece of raw beef instead of attending her high school graduation. The more she tries to express the devastation and pain she is going to the more people do not seem to notice, and the more desperation grows inside her (Lamb 23). So in as much as Dolores contributes to her misery, the people around her fail to notice her problems and help her on time.
Her addiction to food makes her waistline to expand faster than Chinas population, and this food addiction starts after Jack raped her as a teenager. Her mom instead of taking her for counseling and then report the issue to the police, she buys her junk foods and suggestively telling Dolores to shut up and deal with her pain.
So Dolores makes a habit of eating junk foods and watching TV. She finds solace in these to deal with all that pain and anguish. It is not her wish spending time this way and at the same time to grow fat too because as her body expands so does her unhappiness too. She eventually starts to use her fat body as the reason for being cruel to people (Lamb 34). Noticeably she Dolores builds a wall between herself and those around her. And instead of trying to find a solution for this she starts blaming whoever is closest.
She is later admitted to a private mental hospital called Gracewood, where she finds a remedy for her weight. There, she gathers some valuable life skills from Dr. Shaw, who assists her to behave on her own finally.
All the traumatic experience from childhood to teenage distorts the character of Dolores by making her deceitful and a liar. She also becomes mean and selfish for a simple reason for retaliating against those who did not hurt her anyway. At college, she steals her roommate letters from her boyfriend, Dante. It is to say that she grows so mean and have some very unbecoming behaviors as she even drops out of school simply because her roommate’s new boyfriend assaulted her(Lamb 43). And when she stays with her school lesbian janitor for a night she ends up killing her woman’s fish for no apparent reason. At this point, the alienation, death and horrible events in her life become so unbearable, and she decided to attempts suicide.
But it is noticeable that she keeps promises as she did when her mum died she goes back to school. Even though she does not hold on up to the end, but it was time for her too to realize that education would empower her with the knowledge to help her navigate through her challenges (Lamb 68). Her dropping out of college is easily relatable as most of the young people at times do pass through situations that if we don’t find anyone to assist then go through they end up making mistakes (Lamb 76). We can simply say that she lacked guidance and to some portion to blame the people around her for failing to be of help. Her mum as one of those closes to her fails to address her problems and instead makes them worse by assuming she is strong enough to shut up and deal with the rape incident.
Her life is full of oppression and deceit and lies as she tries after withdrawal to make people like her. Though when she meets Dante, he seemed like a good man, but all don’t end well with them as Dante, tells her to perform abortion and secondly divorces her (Lamb 96). We can say that all that is built on deceit never ends well and blame her for her for some of her problems. She paid the price of making Dante break up with her roommate, but again she seemed to have learned to love Dante a lot as the divorce affects her and makes her return to her habit of eating junk foods and watching TV excessively.
Back then when she left the mental hospital, there would be a perspective that she had one golden chance of making things right, but it is also fair to agree that she was driven by naivety to think that she would make Dante fall in love with her. Her imagination becomes the opposite when Dante grows a dislike for her when she tells her their love started on deceit and lies. All the men she meets in her life oppress her either in one way or the other. For instance, when she trusts her grandma's tenant Jack she rapes her, and later Dante too divorces her after making her perform an abortion.
Dolores road to rediscovery and self – confidence too is not an easy one as she always struggles in every scene either to make someone love her or give her attention. Her determination and struggle to find self-worth in the face of a biased society make her go through a lot of pain. She does not give up, and these show the suffering and oppression women go through to fit in a biased society (Lamb 123). Though she is captured as having a lot of flaws, it would also be unfair to expect too much from a woman in society. Throughout her character she finds something challenging to deal with. She even deal more than enough when she is still a kid like the emotional imbalance of her mum the and typically this portrays how the society is so unfair to woman(Lamb 176). Her mum expects her to deal with a horrible incident like rape as a kid fearing stigmatization and condemnation.
Dolores first realization emerges to be a subconscious one. Immediately before having to try committing suicide she calls her mother from known as Geneva. The thought to commit suicide shows that Dolores is psychologically perturbed, though emotionally she seems to be connected to her family and family friend gave that she calls her mother’s childhood friend to talk to her about her status. And what she has done shows that she is come to realization hence taking her first step toward self-discovery.
The next thing that happens to Dolores as well shows that she has not had a smooth growth and transition from childhood to adulthood. After a long duration of undergoing therapy which is catered for by Geneva, she comes to know the actual pains she has experienced. Shaw, her doctor, tries to document her childhood trauma right from the time she was born to the present moment. She takes on the duties and role her mother would have plaid (Lamb 268). With time as positive memories are replacing most of her adverse childhood experiences, she focuses her energy on participating in sketching instead of directing such energy in self-destructive behaviors (Lamb 269). In the long run, she manages to come out of Doctor Shaw’s care and venture into the world to take care of her. From this hospital experience, it is evident that from childhood Dolores has not had a caring mother in her life. Instead, her mother abandoned her without taking good care of her (Lamb 283).
Perhaps Dolores moves away from Dr, Shaw before she gained enough energy and discovers her life. However, after a few struggles, she manages to get her house after which she started dating. She is dating Dante yet, being ashamed of her past life and an attempt to hide the same she comes up with a fictional life history. Contrarily, being that she has emotional recovery, feeling love but psychologically she is living a lie most of the entire time she is with her lover Dante (Lamb 286). She is so desperate to feel loved and have a social connection to an extent she writes a letter to her grandmother telling her of an ideal marriage. Unfortunately, she is being played both emotionally and psychologically when she found Dante having love affairs with his students, it then dawns on her that she is living a life of lies. Finally, she comes to realize that no single man is worth the pain forging her identity hence comes to know that the man she is loving or instead living with cannot define her identity. More of bad things continue to happen to her; she experiences the death of her grandmother of course at this particular time she is melancholic and psychological perturbed thinking that she is destined for only bad things. However, she uses this opportunity to reveal herself to Dante (Lamb 294). Accordingly, in frustration coupled with anger, she opens up and tells him all her past starting from her weight issues, to her rape and the period she spent in the hospital. The books as well emphasize the importance of friendship. For instance, Dolores narrates Roberta about her rape ordeal before even doing so to her mother. She’s Come Undone talks about challenges which are always avoided by other writers including female authors who are supposed to address them (Lamb 422). Such issues include rape, abortion, among others.
Dolores is made to believe that there is nobody who will ever want her due to her past and dark skin. The author makes the audience believe that the lighter someone’s skin is, the more desirable is that person. Because any affection Dolores’ friend s and relatives showed was directed to the people who had lighter skin. To some extent, it appears as if the book is talking about the evils of segregation that took place in the early 1950s, nonetheless entirely the book is about how young children are trying to break through and get life through their mother’s abuse. Without leaving out too much the end of the book is so encouraging given that Dolores gets encouragements from Robert and opt to continue with her life.







Work Cited
Wally Lamb.She's Come Undone. San Francisco, Calif.: Untreed Reads Publishing, 2012. Internet resource.