Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Women of the Cuckoo's Nest
Kesey makes it very obvious with the charcter Nurse Radchet that the patients were caught in a matriarchy (society ruled by women). Nurse Radchet is a ball buster, in that she emasculates all the patients by bringing up their histories, and letting the patients rip on and tear down eachother. Thus reducing the men to almost nothing. It would appear that Harding was institutionalized because of his cheating wife, Bibbit because of his mother and even McMurphy with a count of rape. Could it be that women drive men insane?
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3 comments:
It could be, but at this point we really don't have sufficant information to make that assumption. This really will not be able to be analyzed until after we finish the book. Sorry to disappoint you.
i think that the Nurse drive men crazy because she gives the men at the ward strong medicine to "cure them" or give them shocks. That way the nurse makes them think they are crazy when they are fine.
Kesey has been criticized for making women the root of all the 'problems' in Cuckoo's Nest. With Billy Bibbit's problems stemming from his mother, to McMurphy's accusation of rape from a girl who lied about her age and pursued him aggressively, the women seem to have oppressed the men by keeping them institutionalized. By putting women at the root of the men's problems in his novel, Kesey may be relating the oppression to the uprising of the feminist movement. Kesey could be criticizing feminist movement, whose second wave began shortly before Cuckoo's Nest was published in 1962.
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