Visual Pleasure and Use of Force - Essay Example

Visual Pleasure and Use of Force In William Carlos Williams' short story "Use of Force," the reader ispresented with a violent and disturbing encounter between a doctor and a little girl. The story begins when the doctor arrives in response to a house call. A little girl is sick and diphtheria, a serious communicable and often fatal illness, has been a pressing concern in their region. He is brought into the kitchen where the little girl waits with her father and attempts to examine her. However, the little girl, named Mathilda, refuses to allow him to examine her. The more she fights against him, the more the doctor insists on the examination until it is an all-out war there in the kitchen. Although the doctor finally gets a successful examination, confirming his fears that the girl does have diptheria and has been keeping it hidden from her parents, he is left feeling very disturbed by the encounter. While it is possible to come up with some conclusions about this story without outside input, it is helpful to examine it in light of a theorist such as Laura Mulvey, who applied psychoanalytic theory to film studies in 1975 in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Although she relates her ideas to film, Mulvey's concept that the one who looks has all the power is easily applicable to Williams' story. Within her article, Mulvey examines how pre-existing patterns of behavior and social formations has shaped conventions of story-telling and how that has in turn helped shape a patriarchal society. She makes the case that our ideas of meaning are defined mostly by men who associate their masculinity with their ability to name, define, and control reality. "The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies” (Mulvey 6). In other words, the patriarchic world view is founded on the idea that woman are missing a vital part of the human being, which automatically sets up the man as superior because he does have this part. Because she knows she is missing it, the theory holds, the woman is eager to do what she must to make it up by appropriately lending herself to others' vision of her. Mulvey indicates that Hollywood movies depend on this theme as a means of reaching out to the alienated individual and reinforce the patriarchal obsessions. These are difficult ideas to understand until they are applied to a real-world example, such as Williams' story. Reflecting the language of patriarchy It almost seems the story is written specifically to provide a lesson on the rules of patriarchy as the doctor emerges as the sole narrator. Only his thoughts and opinions matter, which is true both for the reader and for the little family within the home. Among his earliest comments concern his arrival at the home. "When I arrived I was met by the mother, a big startled looking woman, very clean and apologetic" (Williams). His comments are startling not just because they contain no pleasantries at the door in greeting, but because of the clear assessment he is making of the woman based entirely on this first impression of her. Describing her as “big” sets her up as existing outside of the traditional female ideal; she is not the ‘little’ woman in the home. Adding the description that she is “startled looking” begins to give the impression that perhaps she is not very bright and clearly not attractive. "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" (Mulvey 9). Because she doesn’t meet the standard definitions of outward beauty, the doctor feels completely justified in judging her lacking in every possible way. This judgment continues throughout the story as the mother’s attempts to assist are consistently dismissed as being ineffectual at best or actually harmful at worst. Looking at the situation from the viewpoint of a woman, it is offensive to see how the mother is completely discounted as the battle escalates; her husband actually instructs her to leave the room once her value as servant has been exhausted. “You get out, said the husband to the his wife” (Williams). Had she been heeded, the battle may not have occurred as she tried to set the tone early on by first introducing the doctor to the child and then attempting to direct questions about the child’s health directly to the child. Her daring to speak and interject her thoughts in this way are considered offensive because they break with the patriarchal format: "The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifing her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object” (Mulvey 11). While the mother is devalued because of her failure to fulfill her role as icon, the child seems a suitable substitute upon first glance. The doctor’s treatment of the little girl continues to frame the story within the patriarchal system. As a doctor, his first thought upon looking at his prospective patient should have been to assess her appearance for signs of illness, but that is not what he does. Instead, he shows himself to be completely in line with Mulvey’s theory. "Woman … stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning" (Mulvey 6). As he looks upon the child, his assessment places her firmly within this role. “She did not move and seemed, inwardly, quiet; an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. But her face was flushed, she was breathing rapidly, and I realized that she had a high fever. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers” (Williams). The only indication of any medical assessment at all within this passage is his notice that her face was flushed and her breathing seemed rapid – both physical conditions that are often considered, within the patriarchal mainstream, to be attractive indicators of the woman’s excitement at the man’s presence. Therefore, his entire assessment is based upon how well the child fits within an idealized image he chooses to assign her, that of the perfect children in the advertisement leaflets. At this point, she has already become so objectified that he doesn’t even bother trying to speak to her, instead asking the parents about her symptoms and instructing them that he needs to look at her throat. Reading the text as a woman, it is clear that in both his dealings with the mother and with the daughter, the doctor is clearly practicing what Mulvey (and Freud) termed scopophilia: “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (8). While the mother doesn’t seem to pay much attention to it in her concern over her daughter, the daughter clearly has an issue with being treated this way. The doctor’s approach to the girl is that of a man trying to convince a pet they need to do something, "Well, I said, suppose we take a look at the throat first. I smiled in my best professional manner and asking for the child's first name I said, come on, Mathilda, open your mouth and let's take a look at your throat" (Williams). Her resistance to him in this situation should have been expected, but because he’s approaching the situation from such a patriarchal position, and has encouraged the same viewpoint within the parents, it comes as a surprise. Reinforcing the ideology of patriarchy An important element of patriarchy is that the man is in charge at all times. However, Williams includes two men in his story – the doctor and the father. In reinforcing the concepts of patriarchy, Williams establishes the doctor as the Alpha both by allowing him to take up the narrative and through his actions within the scene. Walking into the kitchen, traditionally the space of the woman, the doctor sees the girl sitting on her father’s lap: “He tried to get up, but I motioned for him not to bother, took off my overcoat and started to look things over" (Williams). As the Alpha male, the doctor immediately takes control of the situation. “It was up to me to tell them" (Williams). Through this action, the reader feels comfortable stepping into the doctor’s awareness and adopting his impressions and assessments as their own. “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence" (Mulvey 10). Seeing the scene through this lens, the doctor and the audience have every right to expect the child to behave in an appropriate manner. When she doesn’t, it is the child who is clearly in the wrong. Her parents chastise her and tell her she should be ashamed for acting this way since it is her job to take up the role of the female icon. Describing the expected progression, Mulvey says, "As the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too"" (Mulvey 11). However, the child doesn’t give in to being possessed so easily. The battle between the doctor and the child begins as soon as he steps through the kitchen door. She fails to demurely cast her eyes down as any good little girl child is expected to do which the doctor notices immediately. “The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes, and no expression on her face whatever” (Williams). This kind of bold challenge on the part of the girl is perhaps instinctive, but cannot be tolerated, which is partly what drives the doctor to take the drastic action he takes. Having already established her appearance as ideal for the kind of patriarchic interpretation society demands, it is time to teach her appropriate behavior to match. According to Mulvey, scopophilia functions through either fetishistic scopophilia in which the physical beauty of the object itself becomes satisfying (if the child had actually been a photograph with no volition of her own she might have qualified) or through voyeurism which has associations with sadism in that “pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt …, asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness … Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end” (Mulvey 11). Having established that the child is not conforming to expectations, all three adults in the room take up the charge of forcing her to make a change. Read from the point of view of the female, the story clearly illustrates the mixed messages received by women within this society. The child’s gaze is seen as a challenging behavior that must be stopped, but her refusal to accept the man’s gaze is unacceptable. "As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor" (Williams). This is a significant interaction as Mulvey says, "The look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox" (Mulvey 9). The rest of the scene takes on a horrific element of complicit rape as the doctor, with the help of the supposedly protective father, forces implements down the girl’s throat, ignoring her screams of protest, causing her to gag and her mouth to bleed “while tears of defeat blinded her eyes.” Rather than being praised for the chastity she is supposed to guard with her life, she is instead brutalized for not relinquishing it immediately upon the doctor’s expectation. Conclusion By looking at William Carlos Williams’ story “Use of Force” through the lens of Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” it is possible to see how patriarchic society is both reflected and reinforced through narrative. Attempting to read the story through the eyes of a man followed by re-reading it with the eyes of a woman illustrates some clear differences in interpretation and reveals significant mixed expectations on the part of the dominant viewpoint. Works Cited Mulvey, Larua. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)." Screen. 16.3 (Autumn, 1975) pp. 6-18. Print. Williams, William Carlos. "Use of Force." Web. http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html Read More