The Use of Force Justified

"No ideas but in things," said William Carlos Williams. The short story "The Use of Force" seems to live up to this writer's credo. His characterization in particularly is striking. From a first person narrator's point of view, Williams takes the reader on a house call into what appears to be a working class family's health care choices. Alternately fawning, embarrassed, apologetic, cowardly, and distrustful the parents do not appear as child advocates. They waited three days before calling in the doctor in the hopes of saving three dollars instead of calling him in immediately once they suspected diphtheria. Notice how the father pulls back for fear of contracting the disease from his daughter. However, the girl is afraid of doctors and gives him a good fight; she lies about her "sore throat" but he respects her for it. She is a Shirley Temple-like child portrayed as willful, catlike, furious, and ultimately defeated, perhaps as much by the doctor's good intentions as by the squalor her family inhabits. Yet, she retains her youthful dignity in the doctor's eyes, while the parents become more and more contemptible. The doctor, too, has a bit of a hard-boiled cast to him, like a detective in a Chandler novel. And we see his Hippocratic Oath in action, at first not wishing to discomfort the child but then acting, come what may, from a sense of duty to the community and to his patient to stem the spread of a highly contagious disease which can be fatal if untreated. The use of force, in this case, seems justified, and the short story appears to us like a page out of the doctor's log, but goes beyond its usefulness in that regard. Especially, the last line which characterizes the girl as trying to attack the doctor "while tears of defeat blinded her eyes" does not have any clinical bearing; but rather gives us a description of her physical state, which reveals her inner character.

But here is another reading: Violence as "unjust force" is opposed to force, which means "to constrain to do or to forbear, by the exertion of a power not resistible." Power, in the Orwellian sense, is always power to inflict pain. So the girl may have used violence, and the doctor force. But as long as we are selfish there will always be a governement of "force" (Emerson, Politics). Because the doctor tends to be selfish, the girl's freedom is prostituted: the doctor, who is in power, subverts his (and her) capacity for empathy and compassion by the use of force, thus playing on her fears and sorrows (see Sarah Wider). Such is healthcare in America!