She's Come Undone

Throughout Dolores’s life, she experiences and witnesses imbalanced power dynamics in relationships, sex, and family. It begins when she is very young and she watches her father yell at, hit, and guilt her mother. When Bernice loses her son, Tony fakes empathy by gifting her a parrot, but soon releases it, asserting his dominance over Bernice and her life. After Tony leaves, Dolores is sent to live with her grandmother, who exerts a different type of control over her. Grandma tries to instill strict religious values into Dolores, sending her to a Catholic school, warning her to stay away from strange people, and encouraging her isolation. Dolores battles against these exertions of power by rebelling, picking up smoking, skipping school, and eventually isolating herself in her room.

Dolores puts her trust in Jack, allowing him to drive her home from school and listening to his troubles. When Jack takes advantage of Dolores and rapes her, Dolores wonders if all men are simply abusive power-seekers. She maintains this way of thinking for years until she discovers Dante, whom she holds up as a symbol of a different kind of man: “I reached into my pocket and fingered the edges of the secret Polaroids, the answer to that scary riddle: how women might love men, how men might not be bullies. Resurrection: the word made a pretty sound” (217-18). In college, Dolores has a similar experience with Dottie, who manipulates her into sex that she doesn’t want and makes her feel disgusting afterward. Along the same vein, Dolores marries Dante, who often uses her for sex and seems to care only about himself and his own pleasure. Dante also controls and degrades Dolores, encouraging her to stay home and be a housewife but never giving her the joy of children. Dolores makes endless sacrifices for Dante, including having an abortion for him, forgiving him for spending her savings, and taking him back after he is accused of being involved with a student. Dolores is not allowed to be herself or to exert her dominance—it is always Dante’s decision and Dante’s way.

When Dolores goes whale-watching with Thayer in the novel’s conclusion, she feels at peace with a man who does not wish to hold power over her, who instead allows her to make her own decisions, offering patience and understanding. In turn, this gives Dolores the freedom to love herself and to overcome the pain of her past.

The loss of innocence, or childhood, that occurs alongside growing up is a central theme but holds a special significance for Dolores because of the particularly severe and traumatic experiences of her childhood and youth. Dolores’s loss of innocence begins with the introduction of television into her home in 1956. Dolores is four years old and has never seen a TV before and becomes frightened when she sees people moving on the screen, wondering if they’re trapped inside. Dolores spends much of her childhood and youth in front of the TV, absorbing the fictional lives of others to escape from her own. When Dolores enters middle school, she begins smoking and rebelling against her mother, further indicating her departure from the innocence of childhood.

Dolores’s innocence is further ripped from her by the sexual experiences she has growing up. Some of these are relatively common and normal, such as Dolores being educated by a friend about the nature of sex and menstruation. Others, however, are painful experiences that shape Dolores in negative ways. Dolores witnesses her father abusing her mother throughout her childhood and is exposed to the concept of mental illness early when her mother’s mental health declines and she is eventually hospitalized. When she is 13, Dolores is raped, and it is the pivotal moment that rips her away from her childhood fully and completely. After her mother dies, Dolores looks at a photo of her mother and thinks about how terrifying it is that so much can change between childhood and adulthood: “This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going” (147). It makes Dolores wonder if her dreams and plans for the future are even worth pursuing at all.

When Dolores considers suicide as she swims next to the whale, she has lost the joyful and hopeful part of herself. She spends seven years in the hospital, most of which are spent with Dr. Shaw. His unconventional method of ushering Dolores through a second childhood seems to bring back her childlike wonder and a part of her innocent self again. As the therapy progresses, he reminds her to think like the age she is pretending to be: “Does a fetus have an aversion to her own body? Does a fetus have any expectations whatsoever?” (273). In doing so, she retrains her thoughts and learns to see herself and her life differently. She enthusiastically creates art on her Etch-a-Sketch and swims around the pool during therapy sessions feeling weightless and free.