Woman as Evil Tormentors: The exception being Candy and Sandy, the prostitutes, the other females in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are regarded as uniformly menacing and chilling beasts. Chief Bromden, the novel’s narrator, and McMurphy, the protagonist, are often heard referring to the suffering endured by the mental patients as being akin to emasculation or castration at the hands of Nurse Ratched and the female supervisor of the hospital. The profound fear of women is a central feature of the book. All of the male characters of the novel appear to be in agreeance with Harding, who states, “We are victims of a matriarchy here.”
More specifically, many of the patients in the all-male mental hospital have had their sense of self worth destroyed by domineering females. For example, the mother of Chief Bromden is described as being a castrating woman; so much so that her husband adopted her last name and she transformed a strong leader into a weak and crumbling alcoholic.
In the opinion of Bromden, his mother excelled herself emotionally, building herself up as she put them down, similar to how Billy Bibbit’s mother treats him like a child and refuses to allow him to mature sexually. Through his sexual encounter with Candy, the prostitute, Billy is able to briefly gain confidence and self worth. This is symbolic of him finding his manhood, until Nurse Ratched threatens to tell his mother and drives him to kill himself.
Several more explicit references to castration are made in the novel, further reinforcing the author’s idea the symbolic “castration” of the male patients performed by Nurse Ratched. When Rawler, a patient confined to the Disturbed ward, kills himself by cutting off his own testicles, the Chief states that ‘all the guy had to do was wait’ suggesting that the facility would have castrated him eventually. The mental hospital, run entirely by females, treats only male patients, signifying that women have the underlying ability to rob even the strongest men of their masculinity.
Towards the end of the novel, after having received three shock treatments, Nurse Ratched suggests that McMurphy should have ‘an operation.’ She is referring to a lobotomy, but McMurphy beats her to the punchline by asking if they are to castrate him. Both a lobotomy and a castration have the potential to strip a man of his freedom, individuality and ability for sexual expression.
The Destruction of Impulses in Society
In his novel, Kesey calls upon mechanical imagery to represent a modernized world and biological imagery to represent nature. Through the use of mechanisms and machinery, society is able to control and overpower natural impulses. The hospital, largely representative of society as a whole, is entirely unnatural. Nurse Ratched and her aides are often describe as robotic and mechanical.
In a dream, Chief Bromden sees his fellow patient Blastic disembowelled. Only rust spills, not blood, further supporting his belief that the hospital has taken the life and the humanity from him. Bromden affirms that the institution treats those in its care unnaturally.