-------------------------------------
They don’t call it growing pains for nothing, I guess.
Surviving the teenage years has to be one of the most important – and potentially self-destructive – points in a person’s life. It’s hard attempting to straddle that interstitial space between rambunctious childhood and responsible maturity, all while negotiating limitations of societal constraints, peer pressure and the ever-constant internal battle of your body’s hormones. And throughout all the emotional turmoil the years between eleven and eighteen (sometimes longer!) brings, one must come to realize and accept the fact that their parents are no longer the supreme overlords of their lives. Once a child hits the age when he or she learns they don’t have to obey their parents, rebellion ensues, often with disastrous consequences.
One such fictional character that embodies this struggle against her parental figure is Dolores Price, the narrator of Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone.
At the age of thirteen, she is raped by her neighbor named Jack and subsequently succumbs to grotesque amounts of binging, reaching heavy obesity by the end of her teenage years. She spends the rest of the novel struggling to come to terms with her life, her weight and her sanity. However, the pivotal moment of her climb (or, more fitting, her expansion) into adulthood comes before she is raped, as she vies with her mother for Jack’s attention.
Dolores has a relatively happy childhood with her “proud and protective” father (Lamb 6). However, her problems begin when her father leaves her and her mother for another woman. Already on rocky grounds with her mother, Dolores’s relationship with her father turns cold, and she never regains a close bond with him. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says that “being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed [at the time of childhood]” (814). Additionally, Freud goes on to note that these “impulses” are important in “determining the symptoms of later neurosis” (81). I would think it’s safe to conclude that Dolores’s unsteady and emotionally traumatic relationship with her father certainly leads to her later problems growing up, for she lacks the “normal” father-daughter bond that’s important for development. Throughout the novel, she often notes her longing to reconnect with her father, as well as her inability to relate to her mother.
Obviously, Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex doesn’t perfectly translate to Dolores, for she is a girl where the driving force of the psychosis is typically centered on a boy child. Looking at Oedipus’s story, where he slays his father to marry his mother, “shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes” (Freud 816) where we attempt to subvert and dispute our parent’s authority, all while gaining their love and respect. Again, Dolores never slays nor has a sexual longing for either parent, and yet when she first meets Jack, she seems to be in competition for his attention with her mother.
Ironically, the first notion that this opposition between mother and daughter is occurring is during church services. As Jack is passing the collection basket, Dolores’s “heart pounded almost audibly as I watched him… One time I caught Ma following his movements, too, lip-synching to the offertory prayer rather than praying it” (Lamb 73). Over dinner later that night, Dolores notices her mother flirting with Jack by teasing and poking him, right in front of his wife Rita, who perhaps awkwardly continues to serve dinner. Dolores thinks her mother is acting “so… that word kids [write]… Leaning over and giving him those little slaps whenever he teased her. Horny: that was the word. Ma and her stupid risks, her black-lace bras” (Lamb 78). And lastly, as Dolores is falling asleep right under Jack and Rita’s room, she hears the couple having sex: “I kept imagining them up there, half-naked and feverish – like lovers on the covers of paperbacks” (Lamb 76). She fantasies about Jack, exploring her sexuality through her imagination, which is a completely natural thing for a young girl to do. However, it’s the object of her desire that is a bit un-natural, for Dolores seems to be angry – jealous, even - at her mother for acting so loose towards Jack.
At the age of thirteen, Dolores is well into what Freud deems the “latent stage” of development, where typically there is a repression of desires. However, as she is still young and immature, she can’t completely understand what exactly is happening when Jack begins to flirt and confide in her. She does repress her desires, for she doesn’t come onto to him, and yet she cannot help but admire his attention and crave it. His physical advances make her uncomfortable, but they don’t become dangerous to her until he drives her out into the woods and rapes her.
Dolores has “won” the competition with her mother – and she pays the price for it throughout the rest of her teenage years. After the rape, her mother babies her, providing her with the food and outlets that make Dolores gain obscene amounts of weight. Dolores’s mother sees Jack as the evil villain, with Dolores the innocent victim – which she is – and yet I think Freud would suggest that Dolores was merely playing out the psychosexual urges of a young girl in subverting her mother’s authority to earn her father’s love, which, in this case, has been replaced by Jack. By being unable to mature normally and form a healthy relationship with her real father, Dolores develops neuroses and this directly impacts the rest of her life.
(931)
Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 814-818. Print.
Lamb, Wally. She's Come Undone. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992. Print.
