Women In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

A woman can either be a ball-cutter or a whore. The novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” written by Ken Kesey is set in a psychiatric hospital in Oregon around the 1960’s. The hospital is its own small world of regulations, routine, and discipline ruled over by Nurse Ratched, also known as Big Nurse. All the patients in the ward are believed to have mental illnesses of some sort, a few are “victims of matriarchy” according to Harding. Thus the female characters in the novel can be divided into twlo extreme categories: “ball-cutters” and whores. Through examining the contrasting images of women in the novel, Kesey upholds a misogynistic view of women based on their respective categories. The ‘bad women’ of this novel are called “ball-cutters”
Among the inmates, Harding’s demanding wife has robbed him of all social and sexual confidence. Billy Bibbit’s overbearing and over-protective mother has caused his stammer and terrified timidity in the presence of women. Similar statements could be said of Billy Bibbit’s mother and Mrs. Harding, who take advantage of the instability of, respectively, their son and husband. Kesey suggest that women like these would not be able to obtain a lot of power had they not been associated with weak and unstable men. much like the Big Nurse would not have had that kind of power in the real world while Bibbit’s mother couldn’t have institutionalized her son if he had the capacity to realize his freedom. “ Sweetheart, you still have scads of time for things like that. Your whole life is ahead of you.” (247) Bibbit’s mother constantly tells Bibbit that he can put off his life so he can pretend to be a child forever. Bibbit never went to college and never actually had a girlfriend, all of these things insisted his mother could be had when he was older. This later on led to the frustration Bibbit faces and in the end, so overly abused from this Bibbit resorts to acting like a child day in and day out. Likewise Harding’s wife manages to feed upon his frailty and lack of masculinity to obtain, to her, a comforting sense of triumph. Had she been married
But even without having to conquer the hierarchy of domination there are still women in the book that instead choose to exploit their femininity to maintain existence. Kesey equates these women to be good contrary to the manipulative evil women. Candy, Sandy, and Miss Pilbow are three women have made an impression while not having to be conniving but they made little impact. Sandy and Candy are two of the women in the novel and they happen to treat the mentally unstable men very nicely. That behavior, however, only enforced the idea that inherently they're not women at all and more rather just a product of man's ideals. “ ‘Hey you, Blondie,’ he called over… she turned and looked at him from the end of the dock, then back at us, and you could tell she was thinking about his proposition over…”(206) They're both prostitutes who are willing to succumb to man's desire for the right price and for their work they both never much speak out against the men and will do anything for them. Otherwise, they are helpless in dealing with men, which is apparent in the scene at the docks where Candy was harassed by another man, and without the help of ward patients she essentially becomes worthless and