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The Olson parents’ appearance and home are only briefly described in “The Use of Force.” Given the story’s setting in an industrial river town in New Jersey during the Great Depression, readers can assume that, like other working-class families at the time, the Olsons struggle to make ends meet. This is why the narrator mentions his fee, “three dollars,” a significant outlay and evidence of how concerned the Olsons are about their child. They are class-conscious, apologizing for hosting the doctor in the kitchen rather than in their best room, an apology that passes quickly into embarrassment at Mathilda’s noncompliance. These minor characters play two important roles in the story. The first is to represent the kinds of parents Williams often dealt with, as a doctor himself. His prose writings show that he cared about and respected parents facing the economic challenges of the Depression. Mathilda’s parents know about the diphtheria cases at school, and their only goal is to protect their daughter. Their intense concern that she remains healthy causes their distress and renders them ineffective helpers during the examination.
However, the same traits make them, and especially the father, vulnerable to the doctor’s manipulations as he becomes more obsessed with opening the child’s mouth, even if it harms her. Weaponizing their fear of diphtheria, he compels the father to constrain Mathilda ever more tightly, and he orders the mother to get the heavy metal spoon that he uses in the “final unreasoning assault.” Even as their daughter screams in fear, her tongue bleeding, they participate in the examination even as the father feels faint and the mother is in “an agony of apprehension.” But while the doctor sinks deeper into rage and grasps for professional rationalizations of his behavior, the parents’ motivation is beyond reproach. They just want their daughter to live.
