Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has been a very popular work since it was first published, and many also know the story through the long-running theatrical version or the highly successful movie. A feminist critique of the novel would focus on the way the male characters relate to the few female characters. Some critics noted the poor image of women in the novel when it was first published, and this was long before the strains of feminist criticism developed or even what we today call feminism. A contemporary examination of the novel would show much about the novel's attitude toward women and about how Kesey expresses his own prejudices toward women in this book.

Julian Moynihan in The New York Review of Books wrote about the novel in 1964 and called it "a very beautiful and inventive book violated by a fifth-rate idea which made Woman, in alliance with modern technology, the destroyer of masculinity and sensuous enjoyment" (14). Big Nurse is the melodramatic device in the novel that stands for an arbitrary and indefensible anti-feminine argument. She is the one who controls the men's psychiatric ward, and this control is itself a telling indictment as she is made to appear as one more interested in control than in offering the succor we expect of nurses. She is not the only castrating woman in the story. Moynihan points out that several of the men in the ward, including the narrator, were shoved into mental illness by domineering mothers or wives. The go

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stant threat of shock therapy, the most direct mechanistic assault on male freedom. Big Nurse is the villain in the novel, and she is less a real character than a symbol. Kesey himself has said that a story needs a villain who is truly evil and not just bad, and he has provided such a villain in this novel. He uses caricature to show Big Nurse as the embodiment of oppression. To those on the ward "she is simply the Enemy, the focal point of their fears, frustrations, and angers" (Porter, 48). She has a compulsiveness for order, control, power, and punishment, and this has been conditioned in her by the Combine, the same force that has placed the inmates in her care: "She is in this light as much a victim as a victimizer, but she does not see herself as a victim, and she generates no sympathy because Kesey does not allow her to grow beyond caricature" (48). There are certain aspects of her character and background that are noted in the text. Nurse Ratched is an ex-army nurse, a reason for her dedication to regimentation and routine. Bromden says of her: "A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about i

Category: Literature - K