She's Come Undone
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This paper discusses Wally Lamb's novel, She's Come Undone, the story of the coming of age of Dolores Price. Born in 1952, Dolores marks much of her life by the glimpses of the outside world that arrive on her television screen. She watches impersonal events on her TV that seem to have nothing to do with the chaos and trauma of her own life. Lamb contrasts the parade of images on TV with two other images: a surreal flying leg, painted by her mother while she was being treated in a mental institution, and grey whales, who come to symbolize Dolores herself and her attempts to free herself. Lamb provides a first-person narrative of a woman's struggle with a painful adolescence, a serious eating disorder, and the challenge of learning to live her life. Dolores is a fascinating, difficult character, created by a male writer with an extraordinary compassion for the kinds of issues presented by growing up female in America. Dolores Price's story begins with a memory when she was 4 of watching a television set being delivered to her family's house. She observes, "Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered. Many times each week memory makes me a child again" (17). The set, a gift of her father's employer, is a wondrous machine to the little girl. It is the first in a long line of televisions that provide comfort, escape, avoidance, and mileposts for the next 36 years
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g at the television screen allows her to avoid looking at herself. Nevertheless, she still catches glimpses. As she walks to school one day, she sees her reflection: "I studied myself in the storefront windows. 'Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way,' I told myself. 'I bet she's had a very sad life'" (45). In fact, she has had a sad life, having to deal with the stillbirth of her baby brother, her parents' divorce, her father's unfaithfulness, her mother's bout with madness, and her rape, at age 13, by a family friend. She is filled with anger, and TV allows her to try to run away from the fury and the pain. However, the escape is not real, and she finally realizes that she has to deal with her life instead of trying to ignore it.
After her mother and grandmother die, she revisits her old room in her grandmother's house, seeing it now in a new light:
I'd sat up here for six years, looking angrily out at life and trying to eat away pain. I saw it clearly now: why Ma had fought so hard for me to go to college - had let my awful words bloody her up during those battles about my going off to school. Ma had understood the danger of Grandma's house - how heavy furniture and drapes drawn on the world could absorb a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1379
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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