Nurse Ratched By William Mcmurphy

McMurphy is unaccustomed to not being the person in charge and he attacks Nurse Ratched with sexual comments and exposes her womanly breasts to show her femininity, in order to steal her power. During one of the group sessions, Nurse Ratched asks the patients if they would like to contribute any ideas to help with Harding’s problem and McMurphy chooses to enter the discussion: “‘You ask, I belive, ‘Does anyone care to touch upon-’ ‘Touch upon the-subject, Mr. McMurry, the subject of Mr. Harding’s problem with his wife’ ‘Oh. I thought you meant touch upon her something else.’ ‘Now what could you-’” (44-45). McMurphy begins this attack on Nurse Ratched composure very slowly and innocently, he start with, “You ask, I believe,” which is purposefully very polite.
Alongside words, McMurphy also utilizes physical force to gain power over Nurse Ratched. After the nurse blames him for Billy Bibbit’s death, he is so angered that he makes the decision to attack her while she is in her office: “He’d smashed through that glass door… He grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles stated from her chest and swelled out and out” (319). McMurphy uses his strength to attack Nurse Ratched and lessen her power in front of the patients by exposing her breasts. She hid them because they are an example of her womanhood and since she lives in a sexist society, she felt that the only way she could maintain her power was by hiding the obvious signs that she was a female. When McMurphy attacked the nurse, he “smashed through that glass door.” This shows that he is using his physical strength to attack Nurse Ratched in order to take away her power, and he proves to the others that he has the most power out of all the