It is difficult to pick up a collection of short stories these days without finding William Carlos Williams' odd little story "The Use of Force." Its ubiquity in college anthologies is not surprising, really, in that it simply, quickly, effectively illustrates many of the conventions of short story writing, and thus provides easy means for the instructor's first assault on the elements of fiction. Readily identifiable in this thesis story are theme, conflict, character, tone, point of view. The freshman or sophomore feels secure in his mastery of at least this simple little story, however muddy things may get later on. Sadly, however, such undergraduate confidence is unfounded, for the art of this story is more complex than at first seems the case.

My title advertises rape, but it is perhaps best to begin more innocently, as does the tone of the story, and save the sex for later. The physician who tells the story in a very casual and frank manner fashions himself in the familiar image of the family doctor, who of course achieves great villainy only when he collects an exorbitant fee. As for any pain that a physician might cause, we reason that it is but the necessary prelude to health, and we freely forgive him for it. And we have a rather settled image of our doctor: he is supposed to be cool and calm on all occasions, disciplined to evince only one emotion—sympathetic cheerfulness. When children refuse to open their mouths, he is supposed to make a funny face, and, abracadabra, the innermost depths of Johnny's being are exposed to view. The reader expects as much of the physician of this story, and certainly the tone of his voice is reassuring.

As the doctor begins telling his story, there is no indication of anything out of the way. The doctor-patient relationship is established in a rather wry manner, but the situation perhaps calls for it. He is new to the Olsons, making them a bit nervous and distrustful. They proceed on the assumption that since he is the physician he should tell them what is wrong, not vice versa. The narrator counters with the time-honored tradition of the bedside physician. He attempts to coax Mathilda into opening her mouth, and Williams phrases the girl's response in comic tones—"nothing doing." The mother then helpfully promises that the doctor won't hurt her, and at this false promise the doctor grinds his teeth "in disgust." This is the first indication of an excessive response on the part of the doctor, and as if to balance it he insists that he did not allow himself "to be hurried or disturbed." He spoke "quietly and slowly" as he approached the child again.

But the physician's calm rationality encounters a rather unexpected obstacle—the girl knocks his glasses off; and when the mother admonishes her and tells her what a "nice man" the doctor is, the doctor responds in a most curious way. He sees that he is not at all a nice man to her and that her having diphtheria and possibly dying of it is not the real issue ("nothing to her."). There is something more important at stake here than merely dying.

The physician does not suddenly abandon all reason. He sees that "the battle" is on, but he explains quite coolly and professionally to the parents the alternatives. It was entirely up to them. "He would not insist upon a throat examination so long as they would take the responsibility." At the mention of responsibility, the mother threatens the girl with going to the hospital, thus putting it back upon the physician, whose attitude now takes another strange turn. He scoffs at the mother's threat ("Oh yeah?") almost in words the child her self might have used. An identification has begun to take place, not with the adult world, as represented by the parents, for they were "contemptible" to him, but with the irrational world of the "savage brat." He responds to the challenge of the girl in a quite elemental fashion, scorning the parents, who in the ensuing struggle "grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted. . . . " They are crushed by the vital powers of unreason, in which the physician strangely finds only glory. As he says, "she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bread of her terror of me." The manner in which he responds to this "fury" is seldom recorded in medical journals. He begins to attack the inviolable throat, with the father as a weak and ashamed accomplice, until the doctor "almost wanted to kill him" for always releasing her at the critical moment when he had almost achieved success.

The parents are now beside themselves with shame and "agony of apprehension." Part of their adulthood lies in their being tamed and disciplined in the expression of emotion. The assumption of reason has only made them timid. Violent, unashamed expressions of emotion produce in them the discomforts of embarrassment, since only the pathetic and the sentimental are socially allowed in the adult world. Such scenes of passion remind the adults that they have been cast out of the child's garden of spontaneity, with the curse of shame as the penalty for their original sin. The physician quite spontaneously "had grown furious at a child," but the parents know only one response to fury. "'Aren't you ashamed,' the mother yelled at her. 'Aren't you ashamed to act like that in front of the doctor?'" Especially in front of the doctor, who is the human symbol of that discipline which is at once the idol-god and the frustration of the ordinary, civilized adult, and nothing is more unseemly, more shameful, than to express the fundamental unreason of humanity before this correct and condescending god. "'Aren't you ashamed,' the mother yelled at her . . . ?"

But this is no ordinary physician, or at least he is not behaving in the conventional manner. The encounter with the vital, screaming denial of his symbolic status loosens the hold of his medical code and renews the admiration for that vital force that was and always is the primitive antagonist of man's pretensions of rationality, the antagonist before which the ordinary adult is merely cowed. Thus the physician lends himself to the immortal struggle, with respect for the enemy and scorn for those who surrender meekly to it.

Or so it seems. At least this is the way the physician would have us see it. And the casual, confident tone of the story-telling is almost enough to make us see it that way, too. But then we begin to notice something. It is all right to speak of "immortal struggle" on the heroic plane, but objectively we still must face the fact of a full-sized, furious adult brutally handling a small, sick child. The doctor in understanding the elemental nature of their conflict has allowed its emotional power to sweep him along in some obsession. He is rationally aware that he is contending with a sick child and at the same time allows himself to be drawn into a violent contest of wills. His brutal methods in discovering the nature of the illness expose with rare honesty how a supposedly disciplined adult can be overwhelmed by the subrational wells of impulse within him. The casual tone of the story is achieved by the physician's ironic awareness of his own lapse of discipline. He too "had got beyond reason." And "a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end."

"The end" is nothing so glorious. The sickness of her inner physical being now bared to the world, the girl is initiated into the world of shame. She had only been trying previously to protect herself, to keep from knowing the shame; but now that she has been violated, defense is useless, and she can compensate for her loss of innocence only by a hateful revenge upon her conqueror.

This leads us to notice certain overtones of the language of the story. The choice of words at crucial spots is highly suggestive of a sexual encounter. The physician-patient conflict seems to have been subverted by a more primitive conflict—that of male-female.

When the doctor first sees the child, he notices that she "was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes," indicating immediate recognition of a basic antagonism. The doctor thinks that she is "an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance." We need not make too much of the obvious parallel between a heifer and the virginal Mathilde, but it does suggest the basis of his attraction to her. Further, in the attack, "her face was flushed, she was breathing rapidly," symptoms of disease of course but also symptoms of sexual excitement. The doctor is quite honest in his emphasis upon her physical attraction, being well aware that she has "magnificent blond hair, in profusion." The girl cannot take her eyes off him, in this almost Strindbergian encounter.

The intensity of the love-hate conflict heightens after the girl knocks his glasses off. The glasses, which enable him to "see," (i.e., to reason, to understand), as a product of civilization are symbolic of the artificial devices that stand between the "savage brat" and the physician. As Williams describes it, "with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively" for his glasses. A cat clawing instinctively connotes a female-like reaction against a male aggression. Then "her breaths were coming faster and faster" as the struggle surges to a climax. The physician sees that he "had already fallen in love with the savage brat."

He then makes the parents accomplices to his "assault." The girl sereams in hysterical negation. It is possible, I suppose, to speak of the attack upon the "mouth cavity" with the wooden spatula in sexual terms, although an apocryphal story has it that even Freud put his foot down when someone pointed out to him that the cigar he was enjoying was a phallic symbol. But if one wishes to go that far, then we might as well notice that the girl reduced the wooden blade to splinters, thus calling into use a "smooth-handled spoon of some sort." The result is that the girl begins to bleed. At this point the doctor decides it would be best to go away for an hour or so before trying again. But the obsession has control of him. Williams puts it very graphically: "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." The connotations of rape are unmistakable. The girl is "overpowered" as the physician forces the spoon down her throat, thus exposing the "membrane" that is her secret.

Well, what does all this mean? Is the sexual antagonism cause or effect of the doctor-patient conflict? Is the physician a villain? Or is he simply more perceptively aware of a usual relationship than most physicians are supposed to be?

At this point it is always good to reassure the undergraduate that the girl was not "really" raped, despite the suggestive language. Rather the prevalence of sexual connotation is simply testimony to the animal nature of this conflict. The sexual connotations are there because they express the savagery in human nature that, lying so close to the surface, can erupt at any moment in a flow of irrational behavior, especially in moments of crisis, moments when primitive force is required to achieve some civilized end, as in preventing diphtheria. There is no more revealing use of force, I suppose, than sexual aggression to show how close man lies to the savage within himself. Williams has seasoned his story with suggestive language to bring out the deeper flavors of life, the strong taste of life in the raw.

What of the curious tone of the story? The whole affair is treated as a momentary lapse of an eventually restored discipline, the event reflected upon with an ironic eye; but there are other, modifying tones. It is important to keep in mind that everything is presented from the doctor's point of view. Perhaps this event is not as casual as the physician has tried to make it seem. Perhaps it did permanent damage to his conventional role, and so the ironic reflection is tinged with a bit of awe, the wry tone and comic effects merely an attempt to gain control of an overpoweringly emotional experience, as with Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Certainly the understanding that one has within oneself the potential of savagery breeds new respect for the powers of darkness.