In Lowell as well, Aimee's desires for love and physical affection culminate in her involvement with a young man, William, who at first appears ideal. When an agent who recruits girls for one of the mills takes a liking to Aimee, she's not so much attracted by the future as by wanting 'to see that agent watching me again,' and after a struggle with her parents, she heads off for her new life.īut of course, Aimee finds life in Lowell less than utopian, with its regimented hours and slave-like mechanical labor, of which the novel is a careful document. Soon, however, the possibility of escape presents itself when Aimee learns of 'Lowell, Massachusetts, the City of Spindles - brick building after brick building, the flowers in their window boxes, the girls coming home after work by the canal, arm in arm.' Aimee is seduced by Lowell's bright utopian promises of 'education in a trade' and 'sewing circles and learning circles,' but most of all by the prospect of independence. After a sexual encounter with her younger brother, an experience for which she has no language beside guilt to help her understand it, Aimee feels even further alienated from her mother and family, and from the brother who will no longer even speak to her.

Born in 1829, she is headstrong and intelligent, and as she enters puberty, she is bored with the narrow opportunities offered her of housewifery and teaching at the same time, she is pulled by a sexual desire that her mother tries by example and ominous admonition to repress. The Ladies' Pearl - Aimee Slater is different from her other siblings on the farm and the other young girls of her little New Hampshire town. Unravelling, the longings of the young narrator, Aimee Slater, are strikingly vivid and contemporary, yet the story is set in nineteenth-century New England, at the juncture between the region's rural, puritanical past and all the glittering possibilities of its burgeoning industrialization.īeginning with her exotic name - picked by her mother from a magazine called In Elizabeth Graver's quietly enchanting first novel,

Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver