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Nursing Inquiry 1995; 2: 198-
Reclaiming ‘Big Nurse’:
a feminist critique of Ken Kesey’s
portrayal of Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Philip Darbyshire Department of Nursing and Community Health, Glasgow Caledonian Universiq Glasgow, United Kingdom
Accepted for publication 4 July I
DARBYSHIRE P. Nursing Inquiry 1995; 2: 198-
Reclaiming ‘Big Nurse’: a feminist critique of Ken Kesey’s portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Fleu Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Nurse Ratched or ‘Big Nurse’ in Ken Kesey’s counterculture novel One FZew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of popular culture’s
most arresting and memorable images of the nurse. She is, however, deemed to be remarkable primarily for her malice and authoritarianism. This paper argues that such a purely realist reading fails to fully appreciate the significance of the char- acter of Nurse Ratched. A feminist critique of the novel contends that the importance of ‘Big Nurse’ is less related to how realistic/unrealistic or good/bad she is as a nurse. Nurse Ratched is important because she exemplifies all that traditional masculinity abhors in women, and particularly in strong women in positions of power and influence. This paper explores the stereotype of ‘Big Nurse’ and argues that Kesey’s vision of her ultimate ‘conquest’is not a progressive allegory of ‘indi- vidual freedom’, but a reactionary misogyny which would deny women any function other than that of sexual trophy.
Key words: Big Nurse, Ken Kesey, Nurse Ratched, nurses’ image, nurses in literature, One F h Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
lNTRODUCTION
Nursing has its fair share of heroines in nurses like Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, Edith Cave11 and
others. The heroic qualities of such nurses have been
adopted and often hyperbolized into an entire genre of fic- tion and popular culture, where the nurse has come to r e p resent the angel here on earth. However, for the angel myth to be entirely successful, there must be a counter- point, a demonic vision amounting to what Hunter calls ‘the translocated ideal’.’ For many years Charles Dickens’ Sairey Gamp fulfilled this function. While the ideal nurse was synonymous with the ideal mother, Gamp was the wicked-witch, drunk and dishevelled, sadistic and negli- gent.’ In the iconography of nursing malevolence however,
Correspondence. P Dobyshire, Department of Nursing and Comrnuniy Health, Glasgow Caledonian University Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow. G4 OBA, UK. pda@gcal ac uk
Gamp was to pale into insignificance beside Ken Kesey’s creation of Big Nurse, Nurse Ratched, in his 1960s counter- culture novel One F h Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (OFOTCN).S Such is the power of the image of Big Nurse that Nurse Ratched has become synonymous for all that is bad in nurses and nursing. She epitomizes rigidity, authoritarian- ism, malevolence, power, control, uncaring aloofness, and in much the same way that Sairey Camp did, she manages to make ‘professional’seem a term of abuse. In discussing the popular image of the nurse with classes of students, I am constantly struck by how unques- tioningly Big Nurse is held up as a representation and warning of what can go wrong in nursing if we are not care- ful, an exemplar of uncaring burnaut or of the kind of person (for the problem is usually located squarely within Nurse Ratched) ‘who comes into nursing just to have con- trol over others’ or who is ‘frustrated and needs a man’. The argument in this paper is that such an unquestioning understanding of ‘Big Nurse’ ignores many important insights into both the popular image of the nurse and the
Feminist critique of Nurse Ratched
role and status of women which can be gained from a more critical and feminist reading of OFOTCN. Showalter notes that such a reading should: ... consider the images and stereotypes of women in liter- ature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and woman-assign in semiotic systems.
THE HORROR OF ‘BIG NURSE’
Big Nurse as a monstrous woman
Kesey created Big Nurse as a monstrous figure in every respect. Nurse Ratched’s presence is seen as intimidating, not only in her omnipresent surveillance of men, but in her near gothic physical proportions. The novel’s narrator, Chief Bromden, sees her almost metamorphose in places: She’s swelling up, swells till her back’s splitting out the white uniform and she’s let her arms section out long enough to wrap around the three of them five, six times ... she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor (p. Big Nurse’s size is but one of the many ways in which she embodies American machismo’s worst nightmare - a powerful woman who is unattracted to them. Physical size is a fairly crude but commonplace representational device to indicate a ‘translocation’ of the ideals of ideal woman and nurse. The same approach of turning nurse authority figures into what Karpf calls ‘the monstrously bureaucratic sister or matron, indifferent to human suffering’ (p. 2O9) was used successfully for many years in comedies such as the Curry-On films where Hattie Jacques played the domi- neering Matron, and in the Australian television ‘soap’, Let
the Blood Run Free.
The ideal woman/nurse should be more petite and physically vulnerable, like the Carry-On junior nurses or the ‘Iittle’Japanese nurse on the ‘disturbed ward’ and the two ‘whores’ from Portland in OFOTCN. (We had to wait until
Fay Weldon’s Lz$e and Loves of a She-Devilfor a literary sub-
version of this convention.) Several critics have highlighted the significance of Nurse Ratched’s large breasts in creating her ‘translocated ideaI’.’-gThe ideal mother must have ample breasts to indi- cate both nurturance and sexuality,lO but, despite the fre- quent references throughout the novel to the size of her ‘extraordinary breasts’ (p. 60), Big Nurse ‘fails’ to deliver on both of these counts. She refuses to ‘nurture’ the men on the ward and similarly refuses to express overtly or even hint at the sexual availability which would make her both a ‘real woman’ and almost by definition ‘a real nurse’. Sadly, some nurse commentators seem to have adopted an uncrit- ically sexist stance in relation to Nurse Ratched. For exam-
ple, in the analysis of Kalisch et al.” she is a ‘cold, sexless man-hater’ - as opposed perhaps to a hot, sexy man-lover we must wonder? In Kesey’s misogynistic sensibility, this double denial relegates Nurse Ratched to the moral mar- gins where all of the ‘bad women’ exist.’?
Big Nurse as emasculator
The ‘bad women’ of this novel are the ‘ball-cutters’, the ‘bitches’, the ‘mothers’ (asin ‘motherfF**ers’), in short, all of the women who have ‘caused’ the men in the ward to find themselves inmates in an insane asylum, and who by the novel’s analogy are responsible for the ills of society. Among the inmates, Harding’s ‘demanding’ wife has robbed him of all social and sexual confidence. Billy Bib- bit’s overbearing and over-protective mother has ‘caused’ his stammer and terrified timidity in the presence of women. These ‘bad women’ are Nurse Ratched’s soul mates, the embodiments of everything that was so ternfy- ingly threatening to the fragile all-American male psyche and to the novel’s ‘hero’ McMurphy. It was to be towards the end of the novel that Big Nurse would get what it clearly intends its audience to celebrate as her ‘come- uppance’, when she is sexually assaulted by McMurphy and has her breasts forcibly exposed. During theatrical perfor- mances and film screenings of OFOTCN, audiences have been reported to cheer loudly at this point. Nurse Ratched is forced onto the moral margins of humanity because she resolutely refuses to adopt the sub- missive sexually available role which i s the only one other than whore that McMurphy and the inmates are capable of conceiving for a woman. McMurphy tries every limited strategy at his disposal to provoke Nurse Ratched into dropping her ‘front’ and revealing what simply has to be the ‘true woman’ underneath - the woman who will fall lustfully at the hero’s feet. It is significant that Nurse Ratched has become demonized for being a woman in a position of status and authority who is strong and capable enough to resist McMurphy. She pointedly refuses to crumble at his sexual harass- ment, innuendoes, pinchings and wisecracks, and all of his attempts to ‘bug her till she comes apart at those neat little seams’ (p. 63).3 Nurse Ratched’s most heinous crime it seems is her steadfast refusal to fancy McMurphy, whose claim to being the archetypal ‘ladies man’ is that he drinks, gambles, fights and is ‘clverzealous in my sexual relations’
(p. 41). I am reminded at this point of Gloria Steinem’s
reported put-down of an aggressive questioner who demanded to know if she was a lesbian. ‘Are you the alter- native?’, she replied. By refusing the role of sexual con-
I
Feminist oitique of Nurse Ratched
This is the ‘final showdown’where the Western imagery of the ‘man who’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ comes to the fore again:
We made him stand and hitch up his black shorts like they were horsehide chaps, and push back his black cap with one finger like it was a ten-gallon Stetson (p. 250).
Ostensibly provoked by Billy’s suicide, McMurphy is not carrying out a lone assault but is actually an ambassador for the inmates and thus for all males. Chief Bromden narrates that when McMurphy set off to attack Big Nurse, ‘We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it’ (p. 250). This time Nurse Ratched has gone too far and will have to be dealt with in the manner so familiar to McMurphy and all men who see violence against women as a justifiable strategy to ensure their position of power and control. McMurphy’s attack on Nurse Ratched is a power- ful part of the book’s climax, but it is also very revealing in relation to the novel’s unrestrained sexism:
Only at the last - after he’d smashed through that glass door, her face swinging round, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two n i p pled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever imagined, warm and
pink in the light ... (p. 250).
In its celebration of sexual violence and enforced power, this is a chilling rape scenario. McMurphy has indeed resorted to the use of the ‘effective weapon’ against a woman who poses such a threat to masculinity. But McMurphy’s attack serves other purposes. Nurse Ratched is at last revealed as the sexual being that the men always ‘knew’ that she would be. Her breasts, nipples, femininity, sexuality and vulnerability are now exposed for all to see. The ‘front’ has crumbled. She has been ‘exposed’. The protective white uniform and with it her authority have been torn down. This sexual attack is also significant as it is used to reinforce what is possibly the most offensive aspect of the rape fantasy - that ‘secretly’maybe, Nurse Ratched is gaining some sexual pleasure from being forcefully ‘mas- tered’ by McMurphy. The imagery of the erect nipples is hardly accidental, nor is it likely to be purely Chief Brom- den’s psychosis at work. The ambiguity is introduced that while this physiologi- cal reaction could be due to the shock and fear induced by the attack, it is more likely in view of the nipples’ being ‘warm and pink’ that we are to assume that this is a plea- surable sexual response from Nurse Ratched. And this, readers and audiences applaud.
CONCLUSlON
It is almost impossible to avoid the long shadow that Big Nurse casts across the image of nursing. She is icono- graphic in both popular and nursing culture as the epit- ome of all that is deemed to be ‘bad’ in nurses and nursing. This paper argues for a revisioning of our understandings of Nurse Ratched which recognizes her importance not as the embodiment of bad nursing or bad womanhood, but as a site where the worst excesses of sexism are played out. Even within a narrow realist reading of OFOTCN, the nurse as monster is an inadequate understanding of Big Nurse. Although some critics have highlighted the possi- bility, it is unusual for readers to consider that Nurse Ratched might be a ‘real’ character or indeed a victim her- self. It is much more commonplace for her to be viewed as being so impersonal and non-human as to be merely a metaphor or cipher for societal oppression of the individ- ual. But Nurse Ratched suffers in the way that almost all of the women characters in OFOTCN suffer, by having no story or biography. Kesey, through indifference or design, gives Nurse Ratched no personal history. She simply is. Part of the reason for the success of Nurse Ratched as an enduring symbol is explained by Hunter’s conception of the ‘translocated ideal’. Hunter explains that: The ideal violated in satires of nurses is the expectation of undemanding maternal love and care, a demand that quickly extends itself to sexual compliance. The nurse ought to be the perfect mother, but she fails as surely as her predecessors did, enforcing rules and saying no (p. 124).l I argue that OFOTCN is more of a pubescent parable of male angst, rather than a novel which offers any real contribution to our understanding of either gender rela- tions or the nature of the individual in an increasingly impersonal and corporate world. For the novel to succeed as an allegory of individual freedom confronting the forces of ‘the combine’, it would surely be reasonable to expect that ‘the individual’ should be representative of both men and women who would both suffer under such oppression. As it stands, OFOTCN can be said to represent little more than an ultra conservative attack upon women’s emancipa- tion and advancement. In a discussion of OFOTCN worthy of McMurphy himself, Maxwell acknowledges this and in a conclusion remarkable for its complete lack of irony sug- gests that: Kesey is warning us that some recent developments in American society may serve to weaken masculine individ- uality, assertiveness, and spirit. It is only in the twentieth century that women in large numbers have become finan- cially independent. Competing with men in the world of commerce has made them necessarily more aggressive and
20 I
P Darbyshire
competitive. In addition the male has lost the role of sole provider, he has lost a large part of his traditional image. ... they have turned over to their wives many of their for- mer duties, such as those of chief disciplinarian, keeper of
the budget, and general master of the house. ... Kesey is
telling us that once a certain amount of masculinityin the form of authority and individuality is yielded, it is difficult to regain. Perhaps men have given away too much (pp. 143-144) .I
... to the ‘ball-cutters’and ‘bitches’,one is almost tempted to add. Unpalatable though the book’s sexism might be, this is still an important novel for nurses to read. What we must foster, though, are the educational opportunities to engage in critical dialogue around this and other texts which speak to nursing and human concerns. Integrating what I describe elsewhere as ‘nursing humanities’1+19 into our curricula and practice can enhance nurses’ appreciation of the many different ways to engage and read literature, for example, from a feminist perspective, which will ensure that we do not simply accept or expect realist or represen- tational accounts but challenge the many and varied assumptions and questions inherent in a work. As McMahan argues: Thus we need to help students see that Nurse Ratched is no more to blame for her malice than the black boys are for theirs. The Big Nurse happens also to be the Big Vic- tim when viewed with an awareness of the social and eco- nomic exploitation of women (p. 149)****. Nurse Ratched is our sister, and we want her back.
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