The Role Of Nurse Ratched In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

“ Reclaiming Big Nurse, a Feminist Critique of Ken Kesey’s portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest”

Monstrous figure- In the novel, Kesey portrays Nurse Ratched as a monstrous figure who intimidates the patients to make them small and take their masculinity away.

Translocated ideal- This concept depicts the role of Nurse Ratched. The stereotypical view of her is this ideal woman who has both nurturance as a mother and sexuality. However, the Big Nurse ‘fails’ to accomplish both. Nurse Ratched does not ‘nurture’ the men on the ward and refuses to express sexual availability. Which could define her as a ‘woman’.

Big Nurse as an emasculator- The Nurse is portrayed as the evil woman in the novel. The novel also makes

Nurse Ratched prevents the ward from smoking more than one pack a day, gambling, and watching the World Series baseball on television. She has strict rules and believes that everyone should follow them, and if there is someone who disobeys the other patients are there to call him out for it. Her rules and inflexibility have assisted the patients to turn on themselves and others, especially during their daily

She is a powerful woman which makes her unattractive to the patients in the ward. McMurphy does not like the fact that a woman is controlling the men which makes him and everyone else attracted to her. For her physical appearance, her size is fairly uncommon to represent the ideal woman and nurse.

The ideal woman/nurse- In the novel Nurse Ratched is not portrayed as the ideal woman or nurse. Stereotypically they should be more petite and physically vulnerable like the nurse on the ‘disturbed ward’.The size of Nurse Ratched affects the way the men in the ward see her.

Demonized for being a woman- The position Nurse Ratched has is an authority in which she is strong and capable enough to resist McMurphy. Nurse Ratched purposely refuses to ignore McMurphy’s sexual harassment and all of his attempts to break her. Nurse Ratched’s strongest power is refusal to fancy McMurphy, who has claimed to be the archetypal ‘ladies man’. This makes Nurse Ratched an out of the ordinary nurse or