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. The primary difference between the book and the film is that the film presents the story in a more deliberately realistic fashion, avoiding much of the metaphor of the machine that infuses the book and that in particular becomes a manifestation of McMurphy's perception of the world.
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" (Moynihan 14). Big Nurse is the melodramatic device in the novel that stands for the human manifestation of the machine. 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 (another element glossed over in the film). The good life for these patients is consorting with a good woman, who would be a prostitute, and in running loose with men and occasionally consorting with prostitutes while drunk.
The themes of the novel collide with this idea of the woman as destroyer and indeed depend on that idea at the same time. Big Nurse represents all of womanhood in the structure of the story. She is the one woman who has contact with all the men in the ward, and she stands in for the women who put them there in the first place even as she sees to it that they stay there. McMurphy is dangerous to Big Nurse because unlike the others, he sees...