Executioners

Women are depicted in a harsh and recriminating way In One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: they deprive men from almost everything. Personally, I know a man who I believe has been unmanned by a woman, much like many of the patients in Nurse Ratched's ward. This man goes "cuckoo" most of the time and deviates from that, but occasionally, when he is unsexed and emasculated, he reacts. Unfortunately he always fails and in the end he is oppressed by that strong, demanding, and big woman.

There is a trend in Kesey's novel, where always it is women who command, give orders, and direct men's lives. Right from the beginning, not just the Big Nurse is presented, but along we are told of Hardings seducing wife. Harding believes he may give her reasons to "seek further sexual attention" (page 39). Then it is told that McMurphy is charged of raping a little fifteen year old girl. McMurphy claims she said she was seventeen, but it really made no difference since he believes she was willing to do it. There are a couple other women like Billy Bibbit's mom and the nurses, but the spotlight is on Ratched even though they all strain men in one way or the other. As a big breasted middle-aged woman, Nurse Ratched conveys Kesey's perspective of woman perfectly: they dominate men in a social order were men are treated as inferior sinners, at least in the ward. Ratched's indifference and superiority are her notable defenses to men, "even going so far as to step up to the Big Nurse in the hall one time and ask her, if she didn’t mind tellin’, just what was the actual inch-by-inch measurement on them great big of breasts that she did her best to conceal but never could. She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that’s weak and of the flesh," (page 138). McMurphy expresses his sexual discrepancies towards the Big Nurse to minimize her and appeal as the strongest, but she is ultimately given more reason to continue emasculating men. 

This depiction of woman is certainly the correct one for someone like Nurse Ratched or the woman I mentioned before, but still, not all women are like this. The woman I previously mentioned reminds me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to great extent because of her resemblance to the Big Nurse of course, but also of  McMurphy. She works up to the same social order of her as the sovereign, but like McMurphy, she uses sexual jargon and insinuations and intimidates her man.  When McMurphy tried to intimidate Nurse. Ratched with his sexual comments, she was given more reason to think that McMurphy was actually mentally ill and not so "ordinary" as she thought before. Women are seen as the fixers and castrators over men since men are numerously mentioned to lose their "nuts" and even self castrate themselves along the novel. Men are weak and at the mercy of women in Kesey's novel, breaking the common or natural order of life.