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If you don’t do what the doctor says you’ll have to go to the hospital, the mother admonished her severely.
Oh yeah? I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me.
The doctor’s admiration for the child emerges in these lines, which occur before his first attempt to pry her mouth open. She still has not said a word, but she has embarrassed her parents by knocking the doctor’s glasses off and refusing, even when he asks her directly, to open her mouth. He is already locked in the conflict that will lead to the “final unreasoning assault,” but as he compares the child, with her implacable determination, to her panicking parents, he sees them as collapsing while she achieves “heights of insane fury.”
Readers must recall that the doctor is not a wholly reliable narrator. He may call the parents “contemptible,” but in fact they are behaving, as best they can, responsibly on their daughter’s behalf. Neither the parents nor the doctor addresses Mathilda’s terror of being examined by a man whom, till moments ago, she has never seen. Though the doctor calls her anger insane, it is in fact not only rational but predictable. Three adults should know how to help her, but as different fears drive the emotions of the parents and child, even “magnificent heights” of resistance fail to prompt the doctor or parents to pause or to address the child’s understandable fear.
She fought, with clenched teeth, desperately! But now I also had grown furious—at a child. I tried to hold myself down but I couldn’t. I know how to expose a throat for inspection. And I did my best. When finally I got the wooden spatula behind the last teeth and just the point of it into the mouth cavity, she opened up for an instant but before I could see anything she came down again and gripping the wooden blade between her molars she reduced it to splinters before I could get it out again.
These lines occur as the doctor makes his first attempt to examine the child’s throat, and they reveal how evenly matched, at least at first, the adversaries are. The doctor has his training, and the child has her terror. But by this point, the doctor’s skills are impacted by his anger and his awareness that he is no longer able to control it. When he says, “I did my best,” he means that he exerted the necessary force to press the wooden tool, past pairs of upper and lower clenched teeth.
Just as he reaches his goal, however, Mathilda outwits him by opening her jaws just long enough to get leverage before biting down so hard that she breaks the tongue depressor. Many readers are familiar with tongue depressors and can imagine the bite strength needed to shatter one, and the blow, readers learn just after these lines, cuts the child’s tongue. The first attempt at breaching her defenses provokes her to “wild hysterical shrieks” and leaves her bleeding, yet she does not give up her resistance. And at this point in the story, the doctor’s admiration for the child’s passion ceases, and instead he begins to take “pleasure” in his aggressive treatment.
