Student Question
What makes the doctor in "The Use of Force" unsettling to the reader?
Quick answer:
In the short story "The Use of Force," the doctor’s increasingly angry and violent attitude toward the girl makes the reader a bit uncomfortable. He first views her as a pretty little object in a patriarchal, somewhat pedophile-like way. When she resists his examination, he acts and thinks like a rapist overpowering his victim.
The doctor in “The Use of Force” quickly develops from a seemingly kindhearted caregiver into an angry, out-of-control, and sadistic figure of authority. Because the story is narrated by the doctor, the reader sees the actions and other characters through his point of view. Also, the reader is privy to the doctor’s private thoughts, which disturbingly shift from benevolent to malicious.
At the beginning of the story, a poor mother and father call the doctor to their home in order to examine their daughter Matilda; she has already been sick with a fever for three days. As a figure of authority to whom the parents defer, the doctor at first behaves like a compassionate medical caregiver. What makes the reader uncomfortable initially is how the doctor objectifies Matilda. He first describes her as a frightened and quiet yet “unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer...
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in appearance.” His description sets up a power dynamic with him in a dominant position and her in a more passive, submissive position. He compares her to helpless, virginal female calf, as if she were livestock whose purpose is breeding or serving as meat.
Through his next description of Matilda, the doctor sounds like a pedophile:
She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers.
He portrays her as an idealized woman-child subject to pedophiles’ predilections and gazes; she is like a model posing in a glamour photo on public display.
Things take an ominous turn, however, when Matilda refuses to open her mouth for the doctor to examine her throat. When she first resists, the doctor declares, “Then the battle began. I had to do it.” Initially he admits feeling anger toward her parents but represses his own anger at her because he “had already fallen in love with the savage brat.” Nonetheless, as the “battle” between the girl and doctor continues, their encounter becomes more violent. The doctor becomes like a predator with Matilda his prey.
His examination of her becomes an extended metaphor of rape:
I grasped the child's head with my left hand and tried to get the wooden tongue depressor between her teeth. She fought, with clenched teeth, desperately!
When she bites down on the wooden tongue depressor, the doctor uses a spoon to force open her mouth. His coercive insertion of long, hard objects into a body cavity (i.e., her mouth) resemble a sexual assault.
Even more disturbing are the doctor’s increasingly enraged thoughts. He admits losing control (“I also had grown furious—at a child. I tried to hold myself down but I couldn't.”) and even feeling a thrill at overpowering her:
the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it.
She is no longer a lovable brat but a “damned little brat.” The doctor sounds like a spurned rapist who first sweet-talks this victim and then angrily turns on her when she resists.
Finally, in an “unreasoning assault,” he overwhelms the girl’s neck and jaws.
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