Experiencing the loss of innocence in literature can be quite moving because it represents typical aspects of the human condition which has or will eventually impact every one of us at some point in time; therefore, it’s relatable. One successful American author who has written a novel that focuses on the loss of innocence is Wally Lamb. In Lamb’s novel She’s Come Undone, the main character, Dolores Price experiences a great loss of innocence during her childhood and adolescence due to many unfortunate occurrences, shaping her into a highly unusual and depressed person who eventually has to undergo major transformations with the help of psychotherapy, and by accepting the hardships of life.
It is highly important to understand that innocence is often defined as “freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil” (“Innocence”); therefore, loss of innocence is when a certain degree of guilt or sin haunts an individual as a result of being mistreated. Dolores experiences a loss of innocence at the age of four, not long after her mother Bernice births a stillborn baby. As a result, Bernice has a mental breakdown and becomes a highly depressed and unproductive mother which has a negative impact on Dolores because she is being raised in a miserable household, where her mother and father are unhappy because Bernice fails to recover after losing her son.
Sadly, by the time Dolores is ten years-old, her father becomes unfaithful and physically and mentally abusive. After Bernice realizes that her husband is having an affair with an older woman he works for, she confronts him which triggers him off enough to beat her as Dolores listens, leaving a “bruise on [Bernice’s] lip” (Lamb 30) that takes over a week to begin to fade. When Bernice leaves to calm down at her mother’s house after the beating, Dolores foolishly chooses to stay with her father who doesn’t hesitate to insult her developing breasts as she swims with him, causing her to have negative feelings about her developing body. Her father tactlessly reaches “over and tweak[s] one of [her] bumps, then cuff[s her] on the chin [and asks her if she is] hiding walnuts in there or something” (Lamb 29). Dolores suffers even further when her mother spends time in a mental intuition and her father fails to inform her that he is moving away because he is leaving her mother for another woman. Dolores’s father thoughtlessly sends her to go live with her grandmother in Rhode Island. As a result, Dolores avoids or insults her father every time he tries to make contact—she thinks that her father has “wrecked [her] whole life” (Lamb 97), which clearly alters her innocence.
After Bernice gets out of the institution, she comes to live with Dolores and at her mother’s, who happens to be a dedicated Catholic. “They appear to be a household of damaged women, all of them hiding a desperate, unvoiced tenderness” (Florence). Unfortunately, Dolores suffers another loss of innocence at the age of thirteen, shortly after she meets the new neighbors that are renting an apartment from her grandmother. Although Dolores feels damaged by her father and is devastated because of the move, she manages to become friends with Rita and Jack Speight because they seem like delightful and interesting young adults. Truthfully, “the three of [them]—Grandma, [her] mother, and [Dolores]—fell promptly and hopelessly in love” (Lamb 70) with Jack because he is a handsome flirt.
However, Jack starts inappropriately hanging out with Dolores, which she doesn’t think is strange because she believes that he is a trusted friend of the family. He ends up giving her rides to and from school, and spending time alone with her in his apartment while his wife is at work. One day Jack tells Dolores that he is taking her to see a waterfall out in the middle of nowhere while he is obviously drunk. When Dolores starts to question where they are going, Jack tells her that [she’s] very, very sexy” (Lamb 107). He also tells her that he thinks about her when he’s having sex with his wife Rita. Right before Jack rapes Dolores against her will, she becomes scared and defensive, so Jack says “Little Miss Innocence… fed up with your bullshit. Give you what you been looking for” (Lamb 109). Shortly after the rape, Jack’s wife has a miscarriage, so Dolores foolishly thinks that her and Jack “had killed that baby… destroyed it with the filthy thing [they] did. [She] wasn’t Little Miss Innocence… [She was] Baby killer Dolores, guilty as sin” (Lamb 112). Clearly Dolores is stripped of all her innocence when Jack rapes her at a dog kennel at the age of thirteen.
Sadly, Dolores suffers tremendously after she finally tells someone about the rape. Her mother fails to press charges against Jack because Dolores doesn’t want to rehash the incident, so Bernice attempts to shield her daughter from the real world as long as she can. Unfortunately, it has a negative effect—by the time Dolores is in high school, she expresses extreme behavioral problems and she weighs “two hundred… fifty-seven” pounds (Lamb 125). As a result of Dolores being robbed of her innocence, she is socially disregarded by other students her age because of her weight problem and offensive attitude. Dolores takes comfort by constantly watching television, eating junk food, and taking her ager out on her mother who tries to encourage her to attend college. Every time her mother encourages her to go to college, Dolores refuses and begins “sobbing about overdoses and nervous breakdowns. When she knew [her mother] was listening, [she’d] hustle to the bathroom and stick [her] fingers down [her] throat, gagging dramatically” (Lamb 119).
Consequently, Bernice becomes worn out with Dolores’s constant problems and defiance. One night Bernice decides to take the night shift at her job as Dolores gives her a hard time, finally pushing her mother’s buttons. Sadly, her mother dies that night after she is hit by a car on her way to take a break, causing Dolores to blame herself because she’s “made [Bernice] so goddamned tired” (Lamb 134). At that point, Dolores believes that she has “killed babies [and] mothers. [She] deserve[s] this pain, was owed [her] misery” (Lamb 137). Obviously after Dolores gets raped, she feels nothing but guilt and shame because her innocence has been shattered by Jack’s sexually aggressive misconduct.
With the little strength Dolores has left, she bravely decides to pursue college just as her mother wanted her to. When she arrives “at a Pennsylvania college, Dolores knows that her destiny is to ‘kill what people love”’ (“She’s Come Undone”) because she has been cheated out of her innocence. Unfortunately, after optimistically maintaining a pin pal relationship with Kippy, her future roommate who has no idea that she is obese, Dolores immediately disgusts and disappoints Kippy when they finally meet in person—Kippy thinks “there’s a definite mistake… a mix-up somewhere” (Lamb 187). As she is constantly used and made fun of by her roommate and other classmates, out of defiance Dolores develops an unhealthy obsession with Dante, her roommate’s long distance boyfriend that she has never met before. She illegally intercepts pictures and letters of him and tucks them away as keepsakes. Since Dolores is an “overweight woman trapped in a world that despises and constantly torments her” (Stahl), she stoops to making friends with Dottie, an overweight janitor who is also the butt of everyone’s jokes.
Although Dolores is reluctant to become friends with Dottie because “talking to Dottie was [social] suicide” (Lamb 201), she eventually gets lured in because they share a love for food and television, and Dottie provides her with encouragement. However, Dottie surprises Dolores by kissing her, declaring they were just “two big fat mamas. Nobody cares” (Lamb 228). Dolores is pressured into having sex with Dottie, but immediately feels ashamed and angry after the incident. As a result of the shame that she began to carry as child, and her homosexual encounter, Dolores transforms into a suicidal, vindictive nut case—she “held the scalloped blade against [her] wrist and passed it across. Once, twice—but lightly… [But kills Dottie’s] fish instead. Two glug-glugs’ worth of Clorox per tank. The deaths were quick. They passed the poisoned water through their gills, then rested on their sides” (Lamb 230-1). After Dolores kills Dottie’s beloved fish, she dashes out and locates a cab driver that agrees to take her to an area where there is a beached whale. As a result of the innocence that was stripped away from Dolores by her father, Jack, and Dottie, Dolores sadly and strangely attempts to end her own life by trying to drown herself next to the beached whale. Luckily, she is unsuccessful because an officer discovers her before she drowns.
Because of Dolores’ suicide attempt due to hardships she has faced when her innocence is taken away, she is sent to Gracewood Institute, a private psychiatric facility where she is treated for the next seven years of her life. During her treatment, Dolores is pressured to recall her memories of her father and Jack Speight, something her mother always tried to protect her from. After several psychotherapists fail to help her move on from her troubled past, Dr. Shaw finally starts getting through to her. As Dolores starts opening up about her past and her feelings, it causes her to shed all the pounds that she gained through all the years of enduring the grief and shame she has carried since she was a child. Dr. Shaw determines that Dolores tried to drown herself next to the whale as an attempt to recreate the womb—“trying, perhaps, to reenter the safety of [her] mother—to return to the warm, wet protection of the person who hadn’t yet failed [her]” (Lamb 264).
Dr. Shaw attempts to “rewind [Dolores’] childhood and record over it” (Lamb 266). He tries an unconventional method with Dolores, pretending that she is a young child for the first time ever. He raises her in a motherly fashion, becoming “the first parent who hadn’t left [her] (Lamb 271). Dr. Shaw encourages Dolores to unfold some of the locked up secrets that she hides about her mother, Bernice. During one of their sessions, it becomes apparent that she is aware that before the rape, her mother had been sneaking up to Jack Speight’s apartment while his wife was gone—Dolores “could hear the bedsprings” (Lamb 277). She also becomes able to express her anger about why her mother fed her guilt. Luckily, Dr. Shaw helps Dolores to understand who her mother really was:
“A frag woman, a victim in many ways—of her mother, her husband. Of herself. She’d been wrong to aid and abet [Dolores] in the way she had after the rape, to feed her own and [her daughter’s] guilt, overindulging and tolerating overindulgence… She’d done what she’d done out of fear and limited understanding. She’d been neither a saint nor a whore, but a fallible, sexual woman.” (Lamb 279)
Dr. Shaw also guides Dolores away from much of the anger she feel because of her father, making her realize that he was obviously a bad husband and father, but he wasn’t much worse than that. He helps her realize that the anger she has toward her father is illegitimately intertwined with her feelings about what Jack did to her. She comes to the realization that her father “had not been a rapist” (Lamb 280); therefore, she is able to let go of the ager she feels, and is able to understand her father as a weak man who made weak decisions.
After several years of Dr. Shaw mothering Dolores, she is finally ready to start work in the real world, where she slowly learns how to adapt to society. Although she has overcome many obstacles during her time with Dr. Shaw, and has reached a normal weight, Dolores does fail to reveal one of her secrets, which is the fact that she had stolen Kippy’s letters from her boyfriend Dante and continues to keep and admire them. Soon after Dr. Shaw locates a job for Dolores at “a mail-order photo-developing company” (Lamb 280), one day she recognizes Dante in some of the photos she is developing, so she jots down his address and phone number and proceeds to track him down. When she finally locates Dante and meets him, she fails to mention anything about her being the roommate of his ex-girlfriend, Kippy. She also continues to hide the letters and naked photos of Dante that she intercepted when she was in college.
Dolores is smitten when Dante enters her life—they quickly form a relationship. Dolores who appears to be a recovered individual still faces some obstacles due to the outcome of her extreme loss of innocence as a child, such as being on her own for the first time as an adult, and experiencing her first intimate relationship with a man which obviously frightens her because of the sexual abuse she endured as a young teenager. Although Dolores appears to be adapting to her new life, she still carries guilt for not being honest with Dante about his letters, photos, and the fact that she was Kippy’s roommate after they fall in love. It constantly haunts her because she realizes that if Dante finds out the truth, it could easily end their relationship. Dante also has no idea that Dolores was previously overweight and lived in a mental institution.
Unfortunately, Dolores desires to have a child and Dante does not. As a result of their conflicting needs, Dolores gets pregnant, but to her disappointment Dante pressures her to have an abortion. After she has an abortion she blindly agrees to marry Dante; however, not long after their wedding her husband is accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a student where he teaches, which devastates Dolores, yet she is still too insecure and naive to see the truth and to put her needs first. After Dolores catches Dante having extramarital affair with the seventeen year-old student he was caught with, her grandmother dies and leaves her a house. When she realizes how money-hungry her husband is, she finally spills her guts to him, admitting everything about the letters, photos, her weight, and her suicide attempt.
When Dolores finally lets out the last of her secretes which have been haunting her because they were somehow related to her loss of innocence as a child, Dolores is finally able to stand up for herself, and to fight for her own needs. Soon after Dolores’ confession, she finally realizes what a horrible, selfish person Dante truly is, so she boldly files for divorce. Luckily, “after [her] failed marriage, she takes stock of her life and moves beyond her painful past to grab her chance at happiness” (Rosenblum). Dolores “ends up back in Easterly, in the company of misfits like herself, a bewigged tattoo parlor operator and a homosexual school counselor, and these outcasts are the souls who teach her of true community” (Florence). Sadly, Dolores is never able to conceive a child; however, she does manage to have a loving relationship with Thayer, a man who manages to offer “happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after” (Lamb 453).
Although Dolores Price is stripped of her innocence at a very young age, she manages to overcome most of the hardships that she faces throughout her life and also leans how to let go of her past so she can move forward. Dolores clearly experiences a great loss of innocence during her childhood and adolescence due to many unfortunate occurrences, shaping her into a highly strange and miserable person who eventually has to undergo major alterations with the help of psychotherapy, and by tolerating the difficulties of life. Her loss of innocence defines not only her weaknesses, but also her strengths.
Works Cited
"SHE'S COME UNDONE." Kirkus Reviews.8 (1992)ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014.
“Innocence.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. 2007. Print.
Lamb, Wally. She’s Come Undone. New York: Pocket Books, 1992. Print.
Florence S. "That Hard Road to Salvation SHE'S COME UNDONE A Novel by Wally Lamb 386 Pages, Pocket Books, $21." St.Louis Post - Dispatch (pre-1997 Fulltext): 0. Sep 13 1992. ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014 .
Rosenblum, Trudi Miller. "She's Come Undone." Billboard 109.11 (1997): 65. ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014.
Stahl, Garth. "WOMAN'S LIFE UNRAVELING IN `UNDONE'." Hartford Courant: 0. Sep 14 1997. ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014 .
It is highly important to understand that innocence is often defined as “freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil” (“Innocence”); therefore, loss of innocence is when a certain degree of guilt or sin haunts an individual as a result of being mistreated. Dolores experiences a loss of innocence at the age of four, not long after her mother Bernice births a stillborn baby. As a result, Bernice has a mental breakdown and becomes a highly depressed and unproductive mother which has a negative impact on Dolores because she is being raised in a miserable household, where her mother and father are unhappy because Bernice fails to recover after losing her son.
Sadly, by the time Dolores is ten years-old, her father becomes unfaithful and physically and mentally abusive. After Bernice realizes that her husband is having an affair with an older woman he works for, she confronts him which triggers him off enough to beat her as Dolores listens, leaving a “bruise on [Bernice’s] lip” (Lamb 30) that takes over a week to begin to fade. When Bernice leaves to calm down at her mother’s house after the beating, Dolores foolishly chooses to stay with her father who doesn’t hesitate to insult her developing breasts as she swims with him, causing her to have negative feelings about her developing body. Her father tactlessly reaches “over and tweak[s] one of [her] bumps, then cuff[s her] on the chin [and asks her if she is] hiding walnuts in there or something” (Lamb 29). Dolores suffers even further when her mother spends time in a mental intuition and her father fails to inform her that he is moving away because he is leaving her mother for another woman. Dolores’s father thoughtlessly sends her to go live with her grandmother in Rhode Island. As a result, Dolores avoids or insults her father every time he tries to make contact—she thinks that her father has “wrecked [her] whole life” (Lamb 97), which clearly alters her innocence.
After Bernice gets out of the institution, she comes to live with Dolores and at her mother’s, who happens to be a dedicated Catholic. “They appear to be a household of damaged women, all of them hiding a desperate, unvoiced tenderness” (Florence). Unfortunately, Dolores suffers another loss of innocence at the age of thirteen, shortly after she meets the new neighbors that are renting an apartment from her grandmother. Although Dolores feels damaged by her father and is devastated because of the move, she manages to become friends with Rita and Jack Speight because they seem like delightful and interesting young adults. Truthfully, “the three of [them]—Grandma, [her] mother, and [Dolores]—fell promptly and hopelessly in love” (Lamb 70) with Jack because he is a handsome flirt.
However, Jack starts inappropriately hanging out with Dolores, which she doesn’t think is strange because she believes that he is a trusted friend of the family. He ends up giving her rides to and from school, and spending time alone with her in his apartment while his wife is at work. One day Jack tells Dolores that he is taking her to see a waterfall out in the middle of nowhere while he is obviously drunk. When Dolores starts to question where they are going, Jack tells her that [she’s] very, very sexy” (Lamb 107). He also tells her that he thinks about her when he’s having sex with his wife Rita. Right before Jack rapes Dolores against her will, she becomes scared and defensive, so Jack says “Little Miss Innocence… fed up with your bullshit. Give you what you been looking for” (Lamb 109). Shortly after the rape, Jack’s wife has a miscarriage, so Dolores foolishly thinks that her and Jack “had killed that baby… destroyed it with the filthy thing [they] did. [She] wasn’t Little Miss Innocence… [She was] Baby killer Dolores, guilty as sin” (Lamb 112). Clearly Dolores is stripped of all her innocence when Jack rapes her at a dog kennel at the age of thirteen.
Sadly, Dolores suffers tremendously after she finally tells someone about the rape. Her mother fails to press charges against Jack because Dolores doesn’t want to rehash the incident, so Bernice attempts to shield her daughter from the real world as long as she can. Unfortunately, it has a negative effect—by the time Dolores is in high school, she expresses extreme behavioral problems and she weighs “two hundred… fifty-seven” pounds (Lamb 125). As a result of Dolores being robbed of her innocence, she is socially disregarded by other students her age because of her weight problem and offensive attitude. Dolores takes comfort by constantly watching television, eating junk food, and taking her ager out on her mother who tries to encourage her to attend college. Every time her mother encourages her to go to college, Dolores refuses and begins “sobbing about overdoses and nervous breakdowns. When she knew [her mother] was listening, [she’d] hustle to the bathroom and stick [her] fingers down [her] throat, gagging dramatically” (Lamb 119).
Consequently, Bernice becomes worn out with Dolores’s constant problems and defiance. One night Bernice decides to take the night shift at her job as Dolores gives her a hard time, finally pushing her mother’s buttons. Sadly, her mother dies that night after she is hit by a car on her way to take a break, causing Dolores to blame herself because she’s “made [Bernice] so goddamned tired” (Lamb 134). At that point, Dolores believes that she has “killed babies [and] mothers. [She] deserve[s] this pain, was owed [her] misery” (Lamb 137). Obviously after Dolores gets raped, she feels nothing but guilt and shame because her innocence has been shattered by Jack’s sexually aggressive misconduct.
With the little strength Dolores has left, she bravely decides to pursue college just as her mother wanted her to. When she arrives “at a Pennsylvania college, Dolores knows that her destiny is to ‘kill what people love”’ (“She’s Come Undone”) because she has been cheated out of her innocence. Unfortunately, after optimistically maintaining a pin pal relationship with Kippy, her future roommate who has no idea that she is obese, Dolores immediately disgusts and disappoints Kippy when they finally meet in person—Kippy thinks “there’s a definite mistake… a mix-up somewhere” (Lamb 187). As she is constantly used and made fun of by her roommate and other classmates, out of defiance Dolores develops an unhealthy obsession with Dante, her roommate’s long distance boyfriend that she has never met before. She illegally intercepts pictures and letters of him and tucks them away as keepsakes. Since Dolores is an “overweight woman trapped in a world that despises and constantly torments her” (Stahl), she stoops to making friends with Dottie, an overweight janitor who is also the butt of everyone’s jokes.
Although Dolores is reluctant to become friends with Dottie because “talking to Dottie was [social] suicide” (Lamb 201), she eventually gets lured in because they share a love for food and television, and Dottie provides her with encouragement. However, Dottie surprises Dolores by kissing her, declaring they were just “two big fat mamas. Nobody cares” (Lamb 228). Dolores is pressured into having sex with Dottie, but immediately feels ashamed and angry after the incident. As a result of the shame that she began to carry as child, and her homosexual encounter, Dolores transforms into a suicidal, vindictive nut case—she “held the scalloped blade against [her] wrist and passed it across. Once, twice—but lightly… [But kills Dottie’s] fish instead. Two glug-glugs’ worth of Clorox per tank. The deaths were quick. They passed the poisoned water through their gills, then rested on their sides” (Lamb 230-1). After Dolores kills Dottie’s beloved fish, she dashes out and locates a cab driver that agrees to take her to an area where there is a beached whale. As a result of the innocence that was stripped away from Dolores by her father, Jack, and Dottie, Dolores sadly and strangely attempts to end her own life by trying to drown herself next to the beached whale. Luckily, she is unsuccessful because an officer discovers her before she drowns.
Because of Dolores’ suicide attempt due to hardships she has faced when her innocence is taken away, she is sent to Gracewood Institute, a private psychiatric facility where she is treated for the next seven years of her life. During her treatment, Dolores is pressured to recall her memories of her father and Jack Speight, something her mother always tried to protect her from. After several psychotherapists fail to help her move on from her troubled past, Dr. Shaw finally starts getting through to her. As Dolores starts opening up about her past and her feelings, it causes her to shed all the pounds that she gained through all the years of enduring the grief and shame she has carried since she was a child. Dr. Shaw determines that Dolores tried to drown herself next to the whale as an attempt to recreate the womb—“trying, perhaps, to reenter the safety of [her] mother—to return to the warm, wet protection of the person who hadn’t yet failed [her]” (Lamb 264).
Dr. Shaw attempts to “rewind [Dolores’] childhood and record over it” (Lamb 266). He tries an unconventional method with Dolores, pretending that she is a young child for the first time ever. He raises her in a motherly fashion, becoming “the first parent who hadn’t left [her] (Lamb 271). Dr. Shaw encourages Dolores to unfold some of the locked up secrets that she hides about her mother, Bernice. During one of their sessions, it becomes apparent that she is aware that before the rape, her mother had been sneaking up to Jack Speight’s apartment while his wife was gone—Dolores “could hear the bedsprings” (Lamb 277). She also becomes able to express her anger about why her mother fed her guilt. Luckily, Dr. Shaw helps Dolores to understand who her mother really was:
“A frag woman, a victim in many ways—of her mother, her husband. Of herself. She’d been wrong to aid and abet [Dolores] in the way she had after the rape, to feed her own and [her daughter’s] guilt, overindulging and tolerating overindulgence… She’d done what she’d done out of fear and limited understanding. She’d been neither a saint nor a whore, but a fallible, sexual woman.” (Lamb 279)
Dr. Shaw also guides Dolores away from much of the anger she feel because of her father, making her realize that he was obviously a bad husband and father, but he wasn’t much worse than that. He helps her realize that the anger she has toward her father is illegitimately intertwined with her feelings about what Jack did to her. She comes to the realization that her father “had not been a rapist” (Lamb 280); therefore, she is able to let go of the ager she feels, and is able to understand her father as a weak man who made weak decisions.
After several years of Dr. Shaw mothering Dolores, she is finally ready to start work in the real world, where she slowly learns how to adapt to society. Although she has overcome many obstacles during her time with Dr. Shaw, and has reached a normal weight, Dolores does fail to reveal one of her secrets, which is the fact that she had stolen Kippy’s letters from her boyfriend Dante and continues to keep and admire them. Soon after Dr. Shaw locates a job for Dolores at “a mail-order photo-developing company” (Lamb 280), one day she recognizes Dante in some of the photos she is developing, so she jots down his address and phone number and proceeds to track him down. When she finally locates Dante and meets him, she fails to mention anything about her being the roommate of his ex-girlfriend, Kippy. She also continues to hide the letters and naked photos of Dante that she intercepted when she was in college.
Dolores is smitten when Dante enters her life—they quickly form a relationship. Dolores who appears to be a recovered individual still faces some obstacles due to the outcome of her extreme loss of innocence as a child, such as being on her own for the first time as an adult, and experiencing her first intimate relationship with a man which obviously frightens her because of the sexual abuse she endured as a young teenager. Although Dolores appears to be adapting to her new life, she still carries guilt for not being honest with Dante about his letters, photos, and the fact that she was Kippy’s roommate after they fall in love. It constantly haunts her because she realizes that if Dante finds out the truth, it could easily end their relationship. Dante also has no idea that Dolores was previously overweight and lived in a mental institution.
Unfortunately, Dolores desires to have a child and Dante does not. As a result of their conflicting needs, Dolores gets pregnant, but to her disappointment Dante pressures her to have an abortion. After she has an abortion she blindly agrees to marry Dante; however, not long after their wedding her husband is accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a student where he teaches, which devastates Dolores, yet she is still too insecure and naive to see the truth and to put her needs first. After Dolores catches Dante having extramarital affair with the seventeen year-old student he was caught with, her grandmother dies and leaves her a house. When she realizes how money-hungry her husband is, she finally spills her guts to him, admitting everything about the letters, photos, her weight, and her suicide attempt.
When Dolores finally lets out the last of her secretes which have been haunting her because they were somehow related to her loss of innocence as a child, Dolores is finally able to stand up for herself, and to fight for her own needs. Soon after Dolores’ confession, she finally realizes what a horrible, selfish person Dante truly is, so she boldly files for divorce. Luckily, “after [her] failed marriage, she takes stock of her life and moves beyond her painful past to grab her chance at happiness” (Rosenblum). Dolores “ends up back in Easterly, in the company of misfits like herself, a bewigged tattoo parlor operator and a homosexual school counselor, and these outcasts are the souls who teach her of true community” (Florence). Sadly, Dolores is never able to conceive a child; however, she does manage to have a loving relationship with Thayer, a man who manages to offer “happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after” (Lamb 453).
Although Dolores Price is stripped of her innocence at a very young age, she manages to overcome most of the hardships that she faces throughout her life and also leans how to let go of her past so she can move forward. Dolores clearly experiences a great loss of innocence during her childhood and adolescence due to many unfortunate occurrences, shaping her into a highly strange and miserable person who eventually has to undergo major alterations with the help of psychotherapy, and by tolerating the difficulties of life. Her loss of innocence defines not only her weaknesses, but also her strengths.
Works Cited
"SHE'S COME UNDONE." Kirkus Reviews.8 (1992)ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014.
“Innocence.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. 2007. Print.
Lamb, Wally. She’s Come Undone. New York: Pocket Books, 1992. Print.
Florence S. "That Hard Road to Salvation SHE'S COME UNDONE A Novel by Wally Lamb 386 Pages, Pocket Books, $21." St.Louis Post - Dispatch (pre-1997 Fulltext): 0. Sep 13 1992. ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014 .
Rosenblum, Trudi Miller. "She's Come Undone." Billboard 109.11 (1997): 65. ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014.
Stahl, Garth. "WOMAN'S LIFE UNRAVELING IN `UNDONE'." Hartford Courant: 0. Sep 14 1997. ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2014 .