stuff i do for college: The Use of Force, William Carlos Williams

This is for my Intro to the Short Story class. Hopefully this essay will be a better grade than my last one about the "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" did! I tried to explain things more and I feel like I did better on this paper. Well, anyways, this is my intellectual property etc., etc., etc. Steal upon pain of death and so forth. Enjoy!

“The Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams, is about a doctor trying to look at the throat of a hysterically resistant young girl. The doctor becomes infuriated, but eventually succeeds in getting to see the girl’s throat. The story is saying that sometimes it is necessary to be forceful and that force is sometimes an outcome of simply being human.

Most noticeably is the use of force on the part of the doctor; he orders the girl’s father to restrain her and when he manages to get a “wooden tongue depressor” into her mouth, she bites it to splinters and her mouth bleeds, at the end the doctor sees that she has been hiding symptoms of diphtheria: “both tonsils covered with membrane” (1385-6). It’s not expressly mentioned in the story that the membrane is a symptom of diphtheria, but according to the New York Health Department’s webpage on the disease “a grayish colored membrane may form over the nose, throat, and tonsils”, so it’s clear that she actually does have the disease (New York State Department).

In addition to the physical force used by the doctor, he also mentions his rage at the girl—anger being a sort of emotional force. He describes the struggle as a “battle”, and the father’s failure to properly hold down the girl infuriates the doctor “till I wanted to kill him”, “I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her” he says (1385-6).

The reason for his violence against the child is “a blind fury, an adult shame, bred of the longing for muscular release” (1386). It sounds simple enough—he is just angry and it’s easy to use his strength as an adult male to satisfy his anger by forcing the girl’s mouth open. But the phrase “an adult shame” lends itself to deeper meaning (1386).

An “adult shame”—a shame that is unique to adults, something that a child doesn’t have to feel. A child’s bad behavior is excused because they are young and still learning manners and societal customs, but very few excuses exist for improper behavior in adults. The rage the narrator feels is childlike—disproportionate to his provocation, irrational, and uncalled for in magnitude. Since the narrator is an adult and a doctor it is therefore shameful for him to be so swayed by his anger that he is “longing for muscular release” (1386). He shouldn’t want to do violence to the child, and yet he still wants it.

The fact that this is shameful to the narrator gives us an insight into what William Carlos Williams has to say about the use of force. By choosing to refer to it as a “shame”, he shows readers that he is not in favor of it.

Williams also describes the scene in a very graphic fashion, using phrases like “she shrieked terrifyingly, hysterically”, “her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild, hysterical shrieks”, and finally “tears of defeat blinded her eyes” (1385-6). It is no secret that this experience is traumatizing for the young girl. This of course begs the question of why the doctor would continue to treat the girl so harshly.

The narrator admits that he knows his methods are wrong; “perhaps I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more. No doubt it would have been better” (1385). Why then would he persist?

The doctor has become emotionally invested in this patient; he is enraged, but also trying to save her life. Diphtheria is a serious disease, and “I have seen at least two young children lying dead in a bed of neglect in such cases” (1386). He is so furious with her not because she is spurning his instructions, but because she is endangering her own life by hiding the disease.

By mentioning the two other deaths, the narrator reveals that before he even encountered the Olson family and their daughter he had an attachment to the diphtheria case. The doctor describes the children as “lying dead in a bed of neglect” (1386). “Neglect” meaning, of course, a failure to care for the children. As a medical professional, it was his duty to care for and to heal the children, but they died anyway. This implies that the doctor feels guilty about the deaths even though there may be no cause for him to feel so—perhaps they were beyond help.

Therefore, the doctor would be more determined to save the little girl, because he is not only doing it for her, but also to ease his own feeling of guilt. This would, of course, prompt him to utilize more drastic measures to get the diagnosis. It’s not that the narrator is a bad doctor—he has just been emotionally compromised by the case.

William Carlos Williams is saying that sometimes forcing a patient is a necessary evil. Even though the girl resists and resists, at the end of the story it’s revealed that she is suffering from diphtheria. Wouldn’t it have been a greater tragedy if she was never diagnosed and was left untreated to die? If she didn’t have the membrane covering her tonsils, the story would have a completely different meaning, but the fact that she did, and that it was the doctor’s improper behavior that discovered it lessened the wrongness of his actions. However traumatic and upsetting for the patient, the outcome was a positive one.

The author is also making a statement about the medical profession. By including details in the story about the doctor’s emotions and his past, Williams is reminding readers that a doctor is in fact just a normal human being, subject to all the normal human emotions. And that they also sometimes let their emotions sway their judgment and actions.

“The Use of Force” is by no means a plea for sympathy on the behalf of medical professionals or of their patients, merely a reminder that sometimes the ends justify the means, and the means are subjective to human nature.

nobody likes to get shots