William Carlos Williams's short story "The Use of Force" is a clear demonstration of the phallocentrism and erotic violence discussed in Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."
In Mulvey's piece, she uses psychoanalytic and feminist theory to understand the ways in which the objects of looking in film and narration can bolster patriarchal ideology. She talks about the different pleasures of looking through voyeurism and scopophilia.
In Williams’s short story, a first-person narrator physician is trying to examine the throat of a young girl who will not cooperate. He eventually forces her mouth open to find that she has diphtheria. In this story, the physician can be read as a scopophilic phallocentric narrator; her later admits to taking pleasure in the girl's resistance to his force. The child's parents can be read as the voyeuristic audience, as they watch only to scold their daughter, the object of the erotic violence. In the midst of the physician's attempts to utilize force, he highlights the pleasure he takes in the little girl:
I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me.
http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/155
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
How would you relate "The Use of Force" by William Carlos Williams and Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"?
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