The Character of Elizabeth Gruber in The River Warren :: River Warren Essays

The Character of Elizabeth Gruber in The River Warren After reading The River Warren by Kent Myers, I felt a kinship with Elizabeth Gruber. Her loss had been an enormous one. Her counterpunch to reality and the world around her took great inner strength. The numbness and the void she was experiencing is very real and can be all consuming if not establish in check, not just for women but all humans. We as humans are all different and the grief process is different for all of us. Elizabeth, upon organism aroused from her pit of grief, realizes that her strength and connection with her husband, social lion, is the only thing that is going to bring him back form his deep, dark, prison of regret, grief, and depravity. I felt her pain in both the loss of her child and the painful silence that her marriage had become. As Elizabeth drives to the field and assaults the tractor with a rock, I remember times when I would have love to do the same thing. Only I was not brav e enough to attack the iron mistress that takes away the farmers spare time. Many farmers I last respond to grief, stress and anxiety the same way Leo Gruber does. They bury themselves in their work. There they can think, and they have control. Many times, with all of us, the intense feelings of guilt and sorrow make us feel as if we have lost control of our world. So we retreat to a place where we can have control. For Leo it was his work, and his tractor. Liz Beth brought him back to the real world. Cowboys, farmers and men of the west learned to shut themselves off, and they werent allowed to feel or show emotion. To these men showing real feeling and emotion was a sign of weakness, and the weak dont survive in the west, at least that is the way they were trained to think for many generations. My father is a fourth generation southwestern Dakotan. For many years as I was growing up I wandered if he had ice in his veins, just as Jeff had wondered about his father.