Williams\' the Use of Force

Williams' "The use of force" and Mulvey's patriarchal gaze

A naive reading of William Carlos Williams' short story "The use of force" accepts the stated premise of the story: a little girl will die unless a wise and kindly doctor forcibly looks into her throat. Read as such, the doctor is the voice of scientific reasoning, and the young girl must accept his physical intrusion or else she will die. Viewed through the lens of Laura Mulvey's analysis of cinema's patriarchal gaze, the story takes on a different resonance. The prying open of the girl's mouth and violation of her privacy becomes a rite of female passage. The forcible action of the male becomes read as beneficial and healing only because of social norms. Reading the story, the female reader is forced to take on the male perspective and persona, thereby shutting out the young girl's point-of-view. A female or male reader cannot ask: Why is the doctor not gentler? Why does he not reason with the girl? Why is the girl so stubborn and determined?

The story does not prompt the reader to ask such questions, because it is told through the male's perspective. The child's gaze is only observed by the doctor. "The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes," he says. This comment conceals the fact that the actual gaze the reader perceives is that of the child through the eyes of the doctor. "Fetishistic scopophilia," writes Mulvey, is perhaps the most pleasurable and least anxiety-provoking manifestation of the male, patriarchal gaze of culture because it is simply a gaze: the onlooker looks at the woman, rather than becomes uncomfortably a part of what is dangerously 'not-male' and 'not phallic' through intercourse (Mulvey 840) the doctor's fetishistic penetration of the child after meeting her gaze, and communicating with her by staring at her gaze thus manifests this cinematic, perverse pleasure of looking

To liken "The use of force" to scopophilia, or pleasure of gazing in the cinema may initially seem odd, given that pain rather than pleasure is the reason that the doctor forces the girl's mouth open: the girl is in pain, he wishes to heal her suffering. There is pleasure, however, one could argue, in being the administrator of medical authority as well as what a more Freudian interpretation could call a kind of simulated rape, where a female is penetrated by a male 'for her own good' with a phallic symbol. Rape is given medical authority in the symbolism of the work, and underlined in the title, which approves "use of force." The child's only defense is silence and having a closed mouth, so the reader cannot hear her speak, and the doctor's omniscient first-person narrator tells the reader the girl is a picture, not a human being: "One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers." A feminist might argue that in a patriarchal medical system a woman, throughout her life will be silenced and penetrated. A woman is taught that her natural functions are diseases, such as menstruation (which is characterized as painful), given intrusive gynecological examinations as an adolescent, and then subjected to medically supervised childbirth as a grown woman.

Gradually, the viewer's pleasure of being the knowing doctor shifts to the pleasure of socially-sanctioned unwilling penetration: "But 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," says the doctor as he grows angry with the girl's intransigence. Mulvey might assert that the girl's illness makes her into a kind of erotic object, a being that can be legitimately observed and penetrated by both the doctor and the viewer, which the doctor takes pleasure in subduing. The reader's alignment with the doctor's thought processes grows closer and closer as the penetration is about to take place. The doctor tries to 'sweet talk' the girl, and is frustrated by the protections of the mother, almost as if he were a suitor: "If only they wouldn't use the word 'hurt' I might be able to get somewhere," he thinks. "The spectator identifies with the main male protagonist" as a "screen surrogate," in a film, and in this case, with the doctor as a literary surrogate, while he is objectifying the girl (Mulvey 838).

According to Mulvey, as a film progresses, more often than not a glamorous, seemingly unreachable and untouchable woman becomes progressively more accessible, often debased. The girl's righteous fury, which makes her beautiful, is gradually subdued over the course of the narrative. "I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me." Violence and love is mixed together in the doctor's mind, just as it is so often in constructions of romance in the cinema.