She's Come Undone

Sexuality is a central motif in the novel and plays a key role in the way Trauma Accelerates the Loss of Innocence and the decline of Dolores’s mental health. As a child, Dolores’s knowledge of sex is minimal, but she recalls moments like seeing her mother’s breasts floating in the water and the way her father inappropriately touched her by the pool. She soon starts learning more about it when she meets a new friend named Jeanette at age 10. At age 13, Dolores is groomed and then raped by her adult neighbor, Jack. This process instills a sense of disgust and shame in Dolores in relation to sex, and she spends years wondering why other women pursue it at all. This is further compounded by the way Dottie slowly manipulates Dolores into sex; Dolores later discovers that she isn’t interested in women at all. Dolores is also molested by Kippy’s boyfriend at the Halloween party.

These negative experiences leave Dolores feeling like sex is simply not worth the pain and manipulation that seems to accompany it. In the hospital, Dolores develops a crush on Dr. Shaw for a time, but this diminishes when he assumes the mother role in their therapy. When Dolores leaves the hospital, she meets Dante, who seems kind at first but eventually starts using Dolores for sex, manipulating her into it when she doesn’t want to, and guilting her into letting him penetrate her anally. Dolores does not experience a healthy sex life until she meets and marries Thayer, the first sexual partner to treat her with the respect and consideration she deserves.

While in the hospital, Bernice sends Dolores a painting of a leg flying through the clouds on the wings of a parrot. Dolores finds it strange at first but grows to see it as a symbol of the type of person her mother wished to be, but never could: free, uninhibited, and fully accepting of herself and her flaws. Because Bernice is struggling with her mental health when she creates the painting, it is also a metaphor for the way that Bernice was never able to fully take the leap—the most she could muster was a part of herself. The wings on the painting are inspired by Petey, the parrot that Bernice grows to love before Tony releases it. Dolores takes the painting with her to college, and after she defends herself from a boy who molests her, he takes revenge by destroying her belongings, including the painting. Dolores sees the painting as the last remaining piece of her mother and takes a fragment of the canvas with her, which she later frames when she takes over her grandmother’s home. Dolores takes many years to find the freedom of self-embodied in the painting, but when she does, she is forever changed: “I couldn’t stop—I felt wonderful, as free as Ma’s flying leg” (402). She finally heals, accepting her flaws and shouldering the pain of her past without allowing it to control her anymore.

In Dolores’s life, food becomes a symbol of her pain, the weight of her past, and the power she seeks to cope with it. It also symbolizes the lust and greed men express toward Dolores until she meets Thayer. Dolores’s experiences with food begin when she goes with her father to visit Mrs. Masicotte and is left alone with the woman’s dog. The dog is obese and preoccupied with food and seems to care only about the cookies on Dolores’s plate. Dolores takes to teasing the dog with the cookies, gaining a sort of dark pleasure from making it long for something it cannot have. Dolores introduces her story as follows: “Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles” (17). After her father leaves and her mother is admitted to a hospital, Dolores finds herself isolating, becoming irritable, and pushing away those she loves. When Jack rapes her, Dolores feels more powerless than ever and copes with this by binge eating and then becoming sick. When Dolores is over 250 pounds, she is told that she is likely to die young. Dolores’s weight adds to her position as a social outcast and diminishes her self-worth even further. She is only able to feel weightless and heal when she is given the opportunity to relive her childhood through a nurturing caregiver.