Force, Enforce...

"The Use of Force": Consider that the doctor’s anger is a result of the situation---the urgent need to get a diagnosis, the fear of the spreading disease (that impending “darkness” threatening the social order), his inability to control the situation.  In part, this story dramatizes conventional assumptions about the patient-doctor relationship, and the breakdown of that relationship—more broadly, what happens when our expectations and understanding of the social order, and how certain kinds of social “transactions” operate, don’t function as expected?  It may also be seen more broadly to be about power—what/who is given power/authority in society, and the other/underside of power (powerlessness), and how those relationships can reverse (note the doctor’ s feelings about the girl are ambivalent—she doesn’t play her “role” in the order of things as she should, but the doctor also admires her force of will).  The doctor is ambivalent about his own position vis a vis above (as suggested), and the” use of force” in the story can be looked at from several angles—the girl as a vexing  force (as noted above); we can say the doctor’s use of force is “reasonable,” given the circumstances and need to get a diagnosis (and note that he says he “could have” torn the girl apart—i.e., this is a figure of speech, not literal); yet, in the external conflict  between doctor and patient, the narrator learns something disturbing about himself-- and here lies an internal conflict--  and, more broadly, about the underside of social order, the veneer of professionalism, etc; something perhaps darker about human nature….it is also about “science” combating “ignorance.”  Some of these same themes and tensions can be traced in Williams’ poetry.

Review the sample essay, and my comments on that essay, from which many of the above comments were sourced.