Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver
Elizabeth Graver’s 1977 novel, Unravelling, is intense, raw, sensual, and psychologically astute. Set in the 1820’s in rural New Hampshire, this book is one of the best coming-of-age stories I have read. Graver penetrates the complex inner lives of her characters and imbues them with words and deeds that impart insight and inspire empathy.
Aimee Slater, an older woman, narrates the novel. She tells a mesmerizing tale of how she came to live in a hunting shack on the edge of her parents’ property with limited family contact and minimal social interaction.
As a young girl Aimee lives and works on her family’s farm. Though her family experiences many hardships, Aimee’s relationship with her parents and siblings is positive. Aimee is perceptive, precocious, intuitive, and intelligent. But when she moves into adolescence and begins to have her own opinions, Aimee’s mother withholds her love and her father harshens his tone. Aimee begins to observe the various ways people navigate their feelings. She wonder about her mother’s relationship with her father, “What did she know of the man she lived with? Was he a gentle man with sudden, rare spinnings into rage, or an angry man who mostly held himself in check?”
Aimee and her brother Jeremiah are close in age and spend a lot of time together. As they begin adolescence, the siblings have a sexual encounter in the hayloft of their family’s barn. It is consensual, childlike, brief, and singular. Shame and embarrassment infiltrate their lives and they are never quite the same. In a different era, they might have gone to therapy or talked with a religious figure, but confusion corrodes their relationship. For relief, Aimee decides to leave the farm to work in the mills of Massachusetts. Without understanding Aimee’s motivations, her parents feel rejected and emotionally turn away.
Many tragedies befall Aimee and at age 17 she copes as best she can. She works hard in the mills and lives in a boarding house in Lowell. When she becomes pregnant, Aimee has no one but her family. Instead of sending love and support, her mother sends her a letter filled with judgment and wrath. The letter ends, “Do Not Come Home.” Rather than provide unconditional love, Aimee’s mother’s provincialism and religious superstitions determine her actions. After giving birth, Aimee returns to New Hampshire and does not lie or apologize. And like Hester Pryne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Aimee is shunned. Yet, as the decades pass, she creates her own little family with a disabled man from the town and a traumatized girl named Plumey. Reading about the unraveling of Aimee’s life haunts me. Yet Aimee’s accumulated insight and compassion over the years allow her to understand herself and attempt to reconcile with her elderly mother. As Aimee says of Plumey, “It is the deepest mystery what goes on inside anybody’s head.” Elizabeth Graver succeeds in delving into her characters’ heads and writing a novel filled with emotional and psychological nuance and poignancy.