Feminism In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” has been a topic of both reverence and controversy since its release in 1962. At the heart of the counter-culture movement of that time, “Cuckoo’s Nest” was regarded with respect as a ground breaking look into institutionalization and as an allegorical new-age view of the world. As well as praise, the book has received much criticism for its raunchy themes and sensitive topics such as disability and human sexuality. One question that is often raised among readers, though, pertains to the way Kesey presents the women of the story and the roles they play in its grand scheme. It’s a two part question long debated among literary critics that, in order to internalize the full effect of the story, should

McMurphy and the wicked Nurse Ratched, respectively. It can be argued, though, that Ratched had not become the symbol of terror she eventually personifies until her womanliness became fore fronted. Kesey’s characterization of her as the villain of the story didn’t become quite as clear until McMurphy’s attempts to sexualize her began. Early on, Bromden’s description of Nurse Ratched includes the fact that her purse contains “no compact or lipstick or woman stuff, she’s got that bag full of a thousand parts that she aims to use today.” This lack of femininity makes her, to the patients, unappealing as a female. They view her as nothing more than a slightly grouchy person doing their job. In honesty, even saying they viewed her as a real human before McMurphy brought out the more sexualized version of her among them is debatable. It could be argued that they simply viewed her as the head of, in Bromden’s words, “The Combine”. When McMurphy arrived, he brought with him to the hospital a sense of revolution, sober revelry, and in regards to Nurse Ratched, the overly- sexual drive to take on find the woman behind the machine. As he forces his views of her as a female rather than a piece of “The Combine” on the rest of the ward, her position in the story as the bad guy is made obvious. She begins putting down her patients and uses their lack of masculinity against them as they try to, in a subdued way, stand up for themselves. These parallel turning points from machine to woman and character to main villain are often interpreted, as done in Caroline Leach’s “Disability and Gender in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” as Ratched going from an inhumane thing to an angry female who tries to control the men. Kesey is often criticized for this portrayal, being labeled sexist for saying, at the most bare-boned level of this