Femininity In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Nurse Ratched – the Big Victim Ken Kesey, via his narrator Chief Bromden, introduces the battle between individuality and conformity as well as the issue of mental illness. What a lot of people overlook is the aspect of exploitation of women in the book. The novel was written in the early 1960s, when the second-wave feminism began, which expanded the focus to a variety of aspects such as family, workplace, and sexuality, and devoted to gain social equality regardless of sex (Rampton). In response, Ken Kesey explores a society that is ruled by women to reflect how males are damaged both physically and mentally under such control. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched’s lack of femininity and the consequences of the matriarchy reflect
She makes the schedule of patients’ daily routines, and sets rules regarding smoking, drinking, watching televisions, and so on. If one decides to go against her, she will use all possible means to make him conform, such as the shock therapy. After the first group therapy session, McMurphy calls Nurse Ratched a “ball-cutter” (60), assimilating her to a castrator. Later in the book when Old Rawler cuts his nuts off and bleeds to death, the narrator Bromden’s voice comes up: “What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait” (129). This further emphasizes the fact that even the men are alive, their masculinity will be destroyed eventually. Moreover, Chief Bromden’s mother’s dominating role in the family also illustrates women’s threat to masculinity, i.e. Bromden’s father’s shrink in size after adoping his wife’s last name. Through descriptions of these consequences such as loss of masculinity, a world of matriarchy is created to show what the society will look like if ruled by women; yet this happens to be the precise evidence that reveals the sexism in this