Feminism In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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When McMurphy arrives at the mental institution, his chaotic nature quickly comes into conflict with the head Nurse, Ratched, who controls the ward and all the male patients with absolute authority. McMurphy sees at once that the nurse's game is to set the men against each other so that there's little chance of them banding together to challenge her. When he witnesses his first group therapy session, McMurphy labels it a 'pecking party' because of the way the nurse is able to get the men to verbally peck at each other's wounds.
The novel generally characterizes the women unsympathetically. There are few women in this novel, but the other women like the relief nurse, stands in stark contrast to the cruelty of Nurse Ratched. McMurphy nicknamed …show more content…
At the party in the ward, where Billy's manhood is seemingly affirmed, the prostitute Candy is described in male-dominant terms — "Billy and his girl." By commenting "All these things, Billy? Phrenic this and phatic that? You don't look like you have all these things" (Kesey 260), Candy succeeds in disregarding Billy's mental illness and perhaps the emasculation with which they are intrinsically linked. Candy is also literally correct: As with Harding's seeming lack of impairment, the only display of Billy's mental illness is his pervasive stammer, and Candy's statement could encourage the men's realization that they are "men now. No more rabbits" (Kesey 265) and thus on their way to overcoming, as Bromden does, their emasculations-as-illness. After Billy loses his virginity to Candy, even his stammer is "fixed," if briefly: "'Good Morning, Miss Ratched,' Billy said […]. He took the girl's hand in his and grinned. 'This is Candy.'" (Kesey 270). The return of the stammer coincides with the return of Billy's emasculation, caused by the double threat of Ratched's presence and the pointed suggestion that she does not know "how your poor mother is going to take this" (Kesey …show more content…
Ratched, the leader of the therapy sessions, encourages the patients to see themselves as emasculated, she is the one who labels Harding's wife as his "problem", and also to see each other as "failures" as men, encouraging them to turn on one another by reporting behavior in her log book. As Ratched's power is enforced through her emasculation of the patients, and the successfully emasculated men in the novel are "ordinary" otherwise, the novel seems to imply that an inverted patriarchal norm creates. Nurse Ratched represents what the novel sees as "abnormal," an aggressive matriarch, a female with masculine traits: the "Big" Nurse. The idea of Ratched being masculinized are reinforced by her attempts to suppress her femininity. Her bag contains "no compact or lipstick or woman stuff" (Kesey 4), and her uniform is "starched so stiff it don't exactly bend in any place" (Kesey 38), concealing her body. In fact, Bromden often chooses to figure her as an automaton: "a watchful robot" (Kesey 26), whose face is "smooth, calculated and precision-made" (Kesey 6), hiding her true humanity. Her sexuality unsurprisingly symbolized by her breasts, is, in terms of the novel's logic, shown to be Ratched's own mental illness: Bromden claims "[a] mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would otherwise have been a perfect work, and
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