Essay On One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest exhibits a crucial case study of feminist criticism. Based on the context of the novel, Kesey seems to reject the idea of female dominance. Feminist criticism deals with the reinforcing and undermining the oppression that women face. There are three important characters, which are Nurse Ratched, Candy, and Vera Harding. The author tends to show a bias towars the traditional norm of women, who are expected to be submissive and polite to others. This is exemplified by three major scenes in the book when the Nurse starts the patients’ first group therapy meeting with McMurphy, when Vera Harding shows up at the ward, and when Candy is being objectified by the fishermen before going to the fishing trip. All of these scenes supports that women are forced into a world of oppression and expected by society to be the dominated, rather than be the dominators. When Nurse Ratched first meets McMurphy, she starts off very cold towards him at the therapy session. Nurse begins to exert her power on McMurphy when she shows him a “calculated and mechanical expression to serve her purpose” (48). The way the author depicts Nurse Ratched shows how female dominance is very threatening to the ward. The Nurse’s expression implies a sense of overweening power towards …show more content…
Nurse Ratched is seen as a threatening character who deprives her patients of their masculinity, which reveals how Kesey resists the idea of a matriarchal society. Vera Harding’s conversation with Harding represents how women are oppressed by men in society when Harding adds mean remarks about her grammar. Candy feels inferior, which serves to demonstrate the undermining of women’s identity and sense of self. All three scenes together proves to show that in a traditional society, women are rather pulled down by the men’s and society’s expectations of women to be seen as a submissive
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