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

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“ 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 …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

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Is Mcmurphy Presented In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

958 Words | 4 Pages

Chief characterizes the Nurse as almost robotic in her manipulation and intimidation. In the first chapter of the book, Chief Bromden illustrates how Nurse Ratched uses her position in the ward to control the patients. Chief says, “The big nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use; she’ll point out to an Acute, whenever he goes into a sulk, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is engineered for your cure, or you’ll end up over on that side” (18). Nurse Ratched uses her power in the ward to manipulate and control the patients. This is important because with the Nurse's control, the patients are unable to think and act for themselves.

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Nurse Ratched Quotes

416 Words | 2 Pages

Heartless, cruel, and sadistic are all words people may use to characterize Nurse Ratched. She keeps dictatorial control over her patients, shatters patients' self worth, and is the symbol of evil and oppression in the novel. She treats patients with this authority so that they let her control them, and Kesey through the use of Ratched shows why it’s crucial to stand up and rebel against oppressive authority. Ratched would ruthlessly undermine her patients self worth to a degree where they would become compliant and submissive to her control. The best example of this is how she treats Billy Bibbit, a young, insecure, and vulnerable patient.

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Nurse Ratched In Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo

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However, to Nurse Ratched, this window illustrates her dominance over the ward. “The Big Nurse watches all [that the patients do] through her window” (42). Kesey’s glass division between the sane and the insane demonstrates Nurse Ratched’s overall want of authority. Correspondingly, the Big Nurse is a wolf amongst the hospital full of rabbits. As Harding explains to McMurphy that the patients are essentially small rabbits in the forest that is the mental institution, he also notes that Nurse Ratched is the “strong wolf” that teaches the rabbits their place, much like the hierarchy of nature (61).

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Power In Nurse Ratched

363 Words | 2 Pages

Nurse Ratched is the enermy of the worst kind in this book Nurse Ratched feeds on order, and she wants total power , she plans mind games with her patients. Ratched as the head nurse and as a woman. she is able to move things so that most situations fit her ideas. If Nurse Ratched needs to, she uses the force to get things done. She smiles a lot and verbalizes.

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Nurse Ratched In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

636 Words | 3 Pages

As Nurse Ratched was seen as a professional figure in the hospital, the men saw a professional, rather than a woman. During the time frame these characters lived, women were regarded as delicate creatures and sometimes silly when pursuing a career. However Nurse Ratched had a career so she was not viewed as most women would be during this time frame

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Gender Inequality In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

999 Words | 4 Pages

In Ken Kesey’s comic novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, gender is a definer of one's power in the hospital, and this leads to Nurse Ratched hiding her femininity, the patients’ attempts to boost their own masculinity, and both sides trying to expose the other. Kesey uses these examples to explain that men cannot handle a female leader. Nurse Ratched, a female who is head of the ward, attempts to hide her femininity so the men respect her power. At the beginning of the novel, Bromden is describing the Nurse’s appearance. He states, “A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it” (6).

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Insanity In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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Nurse Ratched is dominant, racist, and unfair in every way possible. Chief’s description of her physical appearance includes comparing her to a “tractor” where he can “smell the machinery inside” (5) and the way she “walks stiff” (4). Sticking someone like Chief, who is innocent but insane, in a setting like this is what fails him from ever getting

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Examples Of Asylum In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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Although he attempts to get the other patients to turn on Nurse Ratched, she still overpowers him. McMurphy refuses to follow the asylum's strict rules which causes tension between him and Nurse Ratched. Robert C. Evans alludes to this in his essay and states, “He also loves to gamble, and, partly to win a bet, he immediately begins to antagonize Nurse Ratched, also known as "the Big Nurse" among the men. Using a combination of humor and insolence, McMurphy continuously defies Ratched in ways both large and small, often making her lose both her temper and her composure.” His personality makes it hard for him to let Nurse Ratched get her way.

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Authority In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

1459 Words | 6 Pages

In the ward, the only individual capable of undermining Nurse Ratched’s power is Randle McMurphy. By blatantly disregarding the nurse’s strict rules, standing up for himself, and encouraging other patients to do so, he creates a situation that jeopardizes the order Nurse Ratched has created. When McMurphy manages to get a fishing trip approved, granted he gets ten other patients to sign up, Nurse Ratched uses malicious methods to thwart his plans: “The nurse started steadily bringing in clippings from the newspapers that told about wrecked boats and sudden storms on coast” (Kesey 178). In order to dismantle the immense progress McMurphy has made towards changing the attitudes of the patients, Nurse Ratched discourages them from attending his trip. Her motive in doing this is to have the patients lose faith in McMurphy, ultimately destroying the influence he has over them.

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Sexism In One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest

775 Words | 4 Pages

Her clothes “could no longer conceal the fact that she was a women”(320). She tries to hide her femininity throughout the whole novel, again because any sign or femininity shows weakness. Nurse Ratched controls all men on the ward and acts as what Kesey characterizes as “manly”. Kesey promotes sexism in this way because of how he characterizes women to look and act in a masculine

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Women In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

994 Words | 4 Pages

Nurse Ratched is the main antagonist who is a very cruel and manipulative nurse, in which all the characters seem to agree that she is out to get them. The other main female role is a hooker McMurphy knew before the hospital who plays a role of meeting the boys needs. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s

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Analysis Of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest By Ken Kesey

1468 Words | 6 Pages

Nurse Ratched has control over every guy in the hospital because she decides what they are doing every day when they wake up. She has brainwashed the men into think they need her. Vera has manipulated her husband Dale into thinking he is disgusting. Billy’s mother has emasculated him by deciding everything for him and letting him have no control over his own life. The men in this novel have lost their manhood to women who have manipulated them and they are too blind to see it till McMurphy shows them.

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Character Analysis

993 Words | 4 Pages

Kesey has used characterisation to get the idea that in this novel there are aspects of venerability and strength. In Nurse Ratched’s case, Kesey has made it so that she is shown with strength and power over the whole ward, including the black men in white, other nurses, and mainly the patients. An example of Nurse Ratched’s power over the patients is when she says to Billy Bibbit, “What worries me, Billy, ' she said- I could hear the change in her voice- 'is how your mother is going to take this.” This shows how one sentence was able to debilitate Billy into begging Nurse for forgiveness and restraint of telling his mother.

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Psychological Issues In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

1010 Words | 5 Pages

The movie was mostly focused on the feud between the warden/nurse Ms. Ratched and McMurphy. McMurphy tried to go against the hard-set plan set by the institution. More he tried to establish dominance and leadership within the group. This threatened the nurse’s ways of subduing patients, and they felt of less importance in their own institution. This led to a bitter rivalry and because of it the nurse tried to subdue, with same techniques as with other patients, McMurphy even after realizing that he was not a mentally unstable person.

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Breaking The Concept Of The Uncanny In Breaking Bad: Breaking Bad?

2950 Words | 12 Pages

“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow” ( Auden, 1989, p.93) Based on the work by Sigmund Freud, human behaviour can be influenced by their subconscious – “the notion that human beings are motivated, even driven by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware” (Freud, 1919). As the forced reflection of what can be understood as unconscious internal conflict or the human ego, Freud (1919) argues that the human body develops defences to keep the “conflict” away from the conscious mind, namely; selective perception, selective memory, denial, displacement, protection, regression, and the fear of death. In this essay we will look at the television series breaking

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