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Emotional reactions can easily overwhelm good intentions.
Keeping in mind that the first-person narrator is a fictional construct and not autobiographical, readers can see that Williams uses the characters of the doctor and the parents to explore the idea that good intentions are not always able to prompt correct behavior and wise choices. The strength of emotions such as fear, pride, and shame can overwhelm good intentions. In the doctor’s case, he knows he must diagnose the child to help her and to manage the diphtheria outbreak in the community, but he can achieve these goals, if he chooses, without the use of force. What drives him to apply more and more force until the “final unreasoning assault” occurs is the anger he feels at the child’s desperate attempts to keep him away from her. The doctor admits more than once that “fury” and a certain “pleasure” in his treatment of the child guides his actions, not detached professional judgment. It takes very little time for his irritation with the whole family to build to rage and violent thoughts. As the only authority in the room, he expects compliance but must threaten the parents and harm the child to get it.
The parents themselves have the best intentions for their daughter and clearly love her. But they, too, are overwhelmed by strong emotions that cause them to make unwise decisions on her behalf. Fear that their daughter could die causes them to comply with the doctor’s increasingly aggressive efforts to see the child’s throat, and shame over their daughter’s attempts to defend herself causes them to fail to advocate for their sick, terrified child. Only once does the mother object, and the father’s fear shuts down the objection, after which the mother turns her emotion against her daughter, saying, “Aren’t you ashamed” for instinctively resisting what terrifies her.
Respect for authority and expertise must be balanced by common sense.
The doctor is the medical expert whose training makes him able to diagnose and care for the child, possibly even to save her life, and this makes him the authority in the room during the story’s events. The Olsons have paid his fee, for them a substantial cost during a time of economic depression in their industrial town, and wait on his judgment. They respect him and his training, as they demonstrate by their apologetic behavior and by their embarrassment when Mathilda resists examination. They are not wrong to behave in this way, given the situation, and the doctor is not wrong to exercise his medical authority. In his own career as a pediatric doctor, Williams was the respected authority in countless examinations and was doubtless aware of the power dynamic between doctor and patient. Expertise balanced by ethics is crucial.
However, expertise and authority can be misused to coerce others, and the doctor, in the grip of strong emotions, allows this to happen. He abandons common sense and admits as much. He “should have desisted” to give Mathilda time to calm down. “No doubt” that was the wiser choice. But he is “beyond reason”—his professional expertise has collapsed. Nor do the parents exercise common sense, so cowed are they by his authority and by their fear for their daughter. A central question of the story is whether, when, and to what extent force may be needed to protect the “damned little brat,” as the doctor calls the child, from “her own idiocy.” The doctor detaches himself from the first-person pronoun I, commenting that this is the kind of thing “one says to one’s self at such times.” He knows that common sense argues against what he is about to do to achieve not just a diagnosis but his own “longing for muscular release.”
Disparities in age, wealth, gender, and education can create perilous power imbalances.
“The Use of Force” is a study in miniature of power dynamics and the factors that influence relationships in which one person has more power than another. Hierarchies emerge in the story, leading to conflicts, cooperation, and harm for various characters. One hierarchy in effect in the story is that of the father’s role as head and unquestioned patriarch of the family. He is responsible for their safety and has authority over them in this setting. He restrains his daughter, orders his wife to “get out” after her single outcry about her daughter’s state, and cooperates with the doctor in the use of force on his daughter, even after her mouth is bleeding. He holds this power as a man, a father, and a husband. But his power is trumped by the doctor’s additional merits. The doctor is a man with the backing of medical training, the assumption of greater wealth, and the authority of public health dictates. The father bows to this power dynamic despite his daughter’s clear distress, partly out of fear for her health but also simply because he doesn’t question the hierarchy.
The mother, of course, possessing little power, backs down when the father overrides her objections. She has nothing but “Do you think she can stand it, doctor!” to say against the doctor’s expert decisions, although readers know from his narration that anger has overwhelmed his training. And Mathilda, as a young girl, has the least standing in this hierarchy. She defends herself as best she can but ends up bleeding, sobbing, and enraged by her treatment. The doctor does get a diagnosis and can now treat the child, but the cost of the use of force in the trauma to her and the whole group is not negligible.
