64 pages • 2 hours read
She's Come Undone
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 17-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Flying Leg”
Part 3, Chapter 17 Summary
Dolores spends the next seven years at Gracewood Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Rhode Island. Four of these years she is kept there involuntarily, and the final three, she chose to be there. Dolores admits that her memories of these years are spotty and vague, as she was put on tranquilizers and spent most of her time watching television.
Dolores starts by recalling a conversation she had with Dr. Shaw, her third therapist at the institute, in which he tried to convince her to find herself beautiful. Dolores finds it ironic because Dr. Shaw himself was quite handsome. He was better than the first two therapists, however, who both seemed to want to do nothing but rehash the same topics over and over. Dolores remembers Dr. Shaw as her “fool and […] magician” (262), who seemed to be able to unlock things in her she was hiding from herself, but who often fell for her charades as well. Dr. Shaw helps Dolores visualize a better, healthier version of herself, but Dolores begins losing weight by visualizing mold on her food instead. She never reveals this to the doctor, instead letting him believe that she is doing as he says. In her discussions with Dr. Shaw, Dolores realizes she poisoned Dottie’s fish to get back at the men who assaulted her and that being with Dottie didn’t mean she was a lesbian.
During one conversation, Dr. Shaw pushes Dolores to think about any positive emotions she may have felt during her time with the whale, and she replies that being in the water made her feel weightless and free. When Dr. Shaw suggests that she was trying to return to the safety of her mother’s womb, Dolores scoffs at the idea but agrees to Dr. Shaw’s unconventional suggestion: He wants to take Dolores back to her fetal state and have her grow up again in a healthy, happy way. The next night, they meet at the pool, and Dr. Shaw assumes the role of Dolores’s mother as she enters the pool naked. In a comical fashion, he pretends to have a fetus growing inside him, commenting on Dolores’s movements. Suddenly, Dr. Shaw is electrocuted by a power cable that fell into some water by his feet. Dolores rushes out of the water and slaps him back to life.
Part 3, Chapter 18 Summary
After the electrocution, Dr. Shaw assumes a complete motherly role for Dolores, ushering her through the stages of her childhood as she swims like a “little guppy” around the pool. On her symbolic 10th birthday, Dr. Shaw takes Dolores to a toy store and buys her an Etch-a-Sketch, which she uses to made pictures of ocean scenery. In 1973, Dolores moves into a group home for people who are well enough to leave the hospital, but not yet well enough to live on their own. There, she is tasked with cleaning duties and spends her free time on her Etch-a-Sketch and watching TV. She continues seeing Dr. Shaw regularly and notes the confusion and tension of the time: “Chronologically, I was twenty-one years old; in the pool, I was twelve, a year away from being raped” (277). Dolores’s sessions with Dr. Shaw start to deteriorate as he pressures her to think about the year she was raped and about how her mother may have contributed to her mental health struggles. However, when Dr. Shaw’s pushing leads Dolores to finally admit the anger she has toward her mother for being involved with Jack, it becomes a breakthrough moment wherein she cries and feels lighter than she did before.
Part 3, Chapter 19 Summary
Dolores continues to make progress with Dr. Shaw, realizing that her mother was someone who survived abuse at the hands of her mother and husband and that her guilt after Dolores’s rape led to an enablement of Dolores’s indulgence in food and isolation. She lets go of her hate toward her father, realizing that his weakness and poor decisions led him to be a neglectful father.
Soon, Dr. Shaw convinces Dolores to take a position at a photo lab beside the ocean. She finds developing peoples’ photographs therapeutic as it lets her know just how strange everyone is. She no longer feels alone in that world. Dolores also loses almost half her body weight by the time she finishes work with Dr. Shaw. She concludes that she no longer needs his help and wants to leave the group home and announces that she has started seeing a psychic to focus on her future, rather than her past. Dr. Shaw reacts with frustration and hurt, trying to convince Dolores to work with him longer. He pretends to suddenly be interested in Dolores’s recent artistic endeavor, her Etch-a-Sketch, of which she has made over 30. After a long argument, Dr. Shaw declares their work finished and tells Dolores to leave without even looking at her. Afterward, Dolores goes to see her psychic, Nadine, who encourages her to draw something that might bring her happiness in the future. Dolores starts drawing a whale, but changes her mind and draws a portrait of a future husband. She walks it home carefully, memorizing it as she goes.
Part 3, Chapters 17-19 Analysis
The first portion of Part 3 details Dolores’s time in the Gracewood Institute; these seven years finally allow Dolores to understand Healing Intergenerational Trauma as a Source of Hope and Body Image and Its Relationship to Self-Worth. She finally begins to heal from the pain of her past and starts over again. While Dolores’s time in the hospital proves fruitful and transformed many aspects of her life and perspective toward herself, it was not able to prevent her from succumbing to The Oppression of Imbalanced Power Dynamics once again, which she finds in Dante soon after leaving the hospital.
Dr. Shaw’s strategy of treating Dolores’s problems is unconventional and unique, as he decides not only to treat her like the whale she identifies with, but also to adopt a motherly role and raise her up from the womb to start life over again. His hope is to uncover the true reasons for Dolores’s pain and anger and to rid Dolores of the weight of her past: “He wanted me to lift up my rotting whale to see if Ma was under it” (267). Like the whales she loves, Dolores feels free and weightless whilst in the water—not trapped, like a beached whale. She finds the therapy relatively easy at first, but as they approach the rape and her mother’s death, Dolores’s emotions reach a new level as she finally admits her anger toward her mother: “Make me take that physical and send me off to college the way I was and get rid of me […] And then you just die, you just die and how am I supposed—well, I hate your fucking guts! So what if you died? So what?” (282). After admitting this, Dolores is able to let go of her anger and realize that her mother, too, was a survivor of abuse and dealt with the same intergenerational trauma. When Dolores figuratively reaches adulthood again, she wants independence from Dr. Shaw the same way she would a parent and starts to think about a possible happy future for the first time. She also begins accessing her creative side, using Etch-a-Sketch as her form of expression. She foreshadows her later meeting of Thayer when she draws a portrait of a future husband she has yet to meet.
Unlock all 64 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Wally Lamb
