One Flew over the Sexist Nest

I groove on the transcendentalists as much as any other red-blooded American.  Give me a story about the individual pitted against the society that is trying to grind all individuals to an undifferentiated paste, and I’ll cheer on the individual as much as anyone else.  Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is just such a story.  Chief Bromden, the half-breed Native American who narrates the story, reveals to us a world of individuals who have rejected and been rejected by the unstoppable “Combine” that hums smoothly along.  The machinery of the Combine has human cogs and pistons that twirl and pump with precision to make the device run smoothly and perpetuate itself. 

In any story about the machinations of society, the author must create representatives of the machine, caretakers that keep it running smoothly, people who aren’t afraid to take a metal file to the gears that don’t fit right and clog up the whole works.  It is in selecting who represents the machine that an author makes his or her specific claims about society and the nature of its woes.  Politicians, millionaires, Big Brother—there are so many targets and causes to choose from!  For Ken Kesey, the caretakers and brutal filers are women and the culture of femininity that they use to crush the spirits of the would-be men.

Yes, Chief suggests that the Combine is much bigger than women, but Kesey focuses his attention obsessively on the women of his world.  Nurse Ratched is the obvious villain, but the concern about masculinity and women who emasculate their men goes way beyond her.  Ruckly’s one phrase, “fuck da wife!”, seems to be an appropriate motto for all the men in the novel.  Harding’s wife, when we meet her, attacks Harding for his laugh, saying, “when are you going to learn to laugh instead of making that mousy little squeak?”  Billy’s mother is a dominating woman who manipulates her son.  Chief recounts the story of his childhood to McMurphy and notes that his mother  played a key role in reducing his father from being a big man: "He was real big when I was a kid.  My mother got twice his size. . . .   She got bigger all the time” and “made him little.”  Moreover, when Chief is talking about how some men escape the Combine, he makes a list of things that men need to avoid.  At the top of the list is “no wife wanting new linoleum.”  The female demands on the man for consumer goods forces men to play by the rules of the combine. 

Amongst all these back stories is the main focus of action and concern: the ward.  The story of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of how McMurphy enters the ward and, like a testosterone-filled Mary Poppins, helps the “rabbits” become “men” again.  After seeing how Nurse Ratched controls the men, McMurphy has a long talk with Harding and declares Ratched “ain’t peckin’ at your eyes”!  He and Harding agree that Ratched is a ball-cutter.  And all efforts to overthrow Ratched center around her sex.  McMurphy warns her to behave properly on his first day in the ward by telling a story of his uncle Hallahan: 

It’s okay, Doc.  It was the lady there that started it, made the mistake.  I’ve know some people inclined to do that.  I had this uncle whose name was Hallahan, and he went with a woman once who kept acting like she couldn’t remember his name right and calling him Hooligan just to get his goat.  It went on for months before he stopped her.  Stopped her good, too.

The threat is clearly sexual in nature.

Ratched’s attempts to nullify her own sexuality seem to frustrate all the men, and the suggestion keeps recurring that if she would just be a real woman, she’d stop ball cutting.  In describing her, they call her “impregnable,” that she has “too-red lipstick and . . . too-big boobs,” even though she tries to disguise them in her uniform.  McMurphy says to Harding,

So you see my friend, it is somewhat as you stated:  man has but one truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it is certainly not laughter.  One weapon, and with every passing year in this hip, motivationally researched society, more and more people are discovering how to render that weapon useless and conquer those who have hitherto been the conquerors— 

Yep, the only true answer to female power is a good raping, and the problem with modern society is that they are figuring out how to unman the most virile of men and make them victims instead of victors.  Later in the novel, McMurphy postulates that “the solution to all your problems would be to just throw her down and solve her worries,” but no one wants to be the one to have sex with such an unappealing creature.  Every attempt to undermine Ratched involves reminding her that she is a woman.  McMurphy “destroy[s] her whole effect” by asking her about the size of her bra cup.  He pinches her ass to belittle her, and the guys on the ward mock her for those pinches in order to take away her power.  And in the end, when McMurphy attacks Nurse Ratched, he first tears off her clothes, and it is unclear if he merely strangles her or rapes her simultaneously.  When she returns to the ward, her power is gone because her sexuality has been revealed:  her uniform “could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman.”

The solution is not just to sexually dominate Nurse Ratched, but to make the men men again.  After McMurphy arrives, Chief reflects on what McMurphy has brought into the ward:  for all the smells he smells while cleaning the ward, “never before now, before he came in, [was there] the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.”  Thank god for the “man smell”!  Baseball on TV, basketball on the ward, blood and fighting, and a great fishing trip with beer and relaxation, the replacing of McCall with Playboy—all good manly things—these are the building blocks by which McMurphy restores the masculinity of the men on the ward.  When he promises to build Chief back up to his original sizes, Chief’s first sign of growth is an erection: “You growed a half a foot already.” 

The open laughter of men is pitted against the manipulating smiles of women, and it’s the machinations of women that make the combine grind out the laughter.  Ratched works by insinuation instead of anything direct that the men could answer to.  When the government folks came to take the land from Chief’s tribe, the two men want to talk directly to Chief’s father, but it is the woman with them who proposes they work by rumor and a letter addressed to the Chief’s wife to reach their ends.  The men on the ward can’t manfully confront Ratched without punishment, so they learn the wily womanly way of being “cagey” and “sly.”

I know that is an annoyingly long list, but even at that it is only a sampling of the instances in the novel in which the fault of society is worked onto the shoulders of women.  

The bemoaning of the feminization of culture is as old as culture itself.  It is a fantasy embraced by some men to explain all their problems on a convenient other, and it seems to crop up every few years along with calls for getting in touch with our primal masculinity.  It’s a worn out attack, and I have zero point zero interest in it.

Kesey’s obsession is all the more upsetting because he is such a great writer.  He deftly handles character and has a keen ear for conversation.  I love the way McMurphy comes off the page, and I think he is a wonderful character all around.  He comes from a long tradition of American tricksters, harkening back I believe to the slave stories of John, who outsmarts Master and the Devil at every turn.  He is a rebellious force whose wit is his most powerful weapon, in the mold of Tom Sawyer, playful and smart and fun.  He has a brain for business and a heart that even though it appears cold is actually warm and caring.  But every time I was enjoying the novel, Kesey would throw a wrench in the works with his ringing accusation that America is being pussified. 

So, if you like excellent writing, fantastic characters, a vibrant world, and a well placed plot, and believe that America is being destroyed by the feminization and unmanning of our virile men, then this is the book for you.