2020-07-30 4:49:34 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

## OK SO

thesynthesist:

> edettethegreat:

> > I was just going through old papers from school, and I came across one of the short stories we had to read- The Use of Force by William Carlos Williams.

> > When we read it in school, my class and teacher couldn’t agree on an interpretation of the story. Some people (me included) found the doctor in the story to be incredibly creepy. Others thought he was doing his best and the young girl was being unnecessarily difficult.

> > To anyone else who read it- please tell me your interpretation

> I hadn’t read it before but I just did and here’s what I think:

> The doctor is indeed doing his best to begin with, and appears to be against the use of force to begin with (his disgust at the parents when they tell the girl the doctor won’t hurt her because he doesn’t want to scare her). However, any objections he has to violent behavior quickly goes away in the face of the girl’s violent reaction to him.

> This is where he starts to get incredibly creepy, as with the help of two other grown adults he wrestles a child for what seems to be a significant portion of time to get a spoon in her mouth, severely injuring her by completely ignoring her lack of consent. At first he seems to be justifying it as being for the greater good of her health but he also admits to enjoying it pretty soon after.

> The way the wrestling part is written reminds me of bits of other stories where there is a hunt or a grand battle where our narrator must triumph over an evil adversarial force and the surge of adrenaline makes them feel alive and ‘savage’. The narrator says he admires the girl more for her ferocity as the match between them goes on. He looses sight of the reason he’s there and what he’s actually trying to do.

> I think the point of the short was that it’s easy to justify the use of force when you are in a position of power even if you consider yourself someone who works for the good of other people and that there was a great adversary for the doctor to beat during the wrestling match but it wasn’t the little girl, it was his own desire to obtain her compliance through the use of force. While he wins the wrestling match against the girl eventually, he ultimately loses to his actual foe, himself.

> As for the little girl, considering she has 3 days worth of bacterial matting on the back of her throat which probably sucks, and also 3 whole grown adults trying to push her around while she’s hurt and scared I’d say she was acting perfectly reasonably. The fact that she wasn’t obeying someone in a position of power doesn’t mean that the use of force is justified but we’re also only given the POV from the doctor. That makes it easy for us to empathize with him and come down on his side even if his side ends up creepy and abusive.

> Again this leads me to believe that the point of the story is to show just how easy it can be to justify the use of force, because since we’re completely sunk into the doctor’s POV we are with him in a position of power. We are with him in that our ideal resolution to the situation is that the girl does as she is asked and opens her mouth so she can receive a diagnosis and treatment. So we are with him (largely) when he decides to use force, and some folks may be with him the whole way to the end.

> I think if you were to rewrite this short from the perspective of the little girl, her fear at both the doctor and the punishment of disobedience, her rising revulsion at the thought that she is helpless here between 3 people who no matter what they say do not wish to listen to her and help her, you’d have far less people thinking that the doctor was being reasonable.