[2] While most of Williams’s short stories remain relatively unknown, “The Use of Force” has been widely anthologized since 1950, establishing it as part of the American literary canon.
[3] “The Use of Force” has been termed “Williams’s most popular story.”[4] The story is narrated in the first-person confessional point-of-view by a rural physician, who is making a farmhouse call to tend to a sick girl.
However, the girl adamantly refuses to cooperate, and the doctor eventually engages in a virtual assault on the child to restrain her and examine her throat using a spoon.
The doctor finds that the girl, who was alerted at school that diphtheria might be fatal, had concealed the symptoms of the infection, and has in fact contracted the deadly pathogen.
[8]Medical doctor and literary critic Richard and Enid Rhodes Peschel cite a key passage from “The Use of Force” in which the doctor’s effort to examine the 10-year-old girl Mathilda Olson for diphtheria, descends into a violent struggle of wills, in which he physically subdues her, described here by the doctor/narrator: I grasped the child’s head with my left hand and tried to get the wooden tongue depressor between her teeth.