Sexuality has always been a powerful tool for writers: it can create heroes or destroy them, forge relationships or destroy them, suggest abject misery or heavenly bliss. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest offers a unique approach to this theme: there is not a single long-standing relationship in the entire novel, yet sexuality is one of the most important themes in terms of plot development. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Before looking at the details, you need to focus on the broader issues at play in this work. The Oregon State Mental Hospital, where the novel is set, immediately suggests the importance of this theme to the plot. The institute is run almost entirely by women and all patients are men. The radical division of the two sexes affirms the role of each gender in history from the beginning. Women are the ones in charge, the ones who dictate the rules and enforce them (if they choose to do so). Men, on the other hand, must be silent, submissive and obedient. As Harding says in one of the book's most memorable quotes: "Here we are victims of a matriarchy." Given that the book was written in the 1950s, at a time when decidedly concrete gender roles were commonly advocated, it is likely that this reversal was intended to shock readers. Much of the scandal caused by the book originated from the silent implication that women could control men. The matriarch of the novel is Nurse Ratched: a once-attractive 50-year-old woman who is the head of the ward. He exerts his power over patients and other staff members with a total lack of remorse. The metaphors used in her initial description are decidedly unnatural: "Precise, automatic gestures. Her face is smooth, calculated and precisely made, like an expensive doll, her skin like flesh-colored nail polish." The implication is that she is the tool of a machine-like society and, as such, has taken on its characteristics. She is devoid of feelings such as compassion, empathy and remorse: all that remains is a plastic smile of practiced sympathy that hides completely opposite intentions. The dehumanization of his character extends beyond his personality. The "Big Nurse" wears a uniform that is too starched and tight to hide her large breasts, a symbol of her femininity, and therefore of carnal weakness. “Somehow a mistake was made in the production, putting those big female breasts on what would otherwise have been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter I am about it.” The result is a ruler as impenetrable as a fortress: simply put, he has no weaknesses to exploit. Innuendo and guilt are his main weapons, used to repress any rebellious behavior and make patients believe they are doing something wrong. "He doesn't need to accuse. He has a genius for insinuation." The intentions behind Nurse Ratched's cold, sexless attire are explained by Harding: "Man has but one weapon against [women] but it certainly is not laughter. A weapon, and with each passing year in this ... society, more and more people are figuring out how to make that weapon unusable." Harding is talking about the male phallus, a tool that men use to subvert women. Nurse Ratched's composed clothing and cold attitude, however, reject the human feelings a man would feel towards a beautiful (albeit old) woman like her. By doing so, he manages to weaken men, reversing the situation. McMurphy is forced to agree: "I couldn't get mad at the old facefrozen in there if she had the beauty of Marilyn Monroe." Nurse Ratched's nemesis is Randle McMurphy. He's the newest addition to the ward and unlike anyone Nurse Ratched and the other patients have ever seen. He's a con man, a prankster, a gambler and, above all, a playboy, so much so that his sexual relations are one of the reasons he was sent to hospital: "'psychopath' means I fight and fuh - excuse me, sir - it means I'm too zealous in my sexual relations." The novel describes him as emotionally strong because he possesses two qualities that no one else in the department has: sexual freedom and the ability to laugh. For these reasons he is also the only truly "sane" character of the novel. McMurphy can, in a sense, be seen as a beacon of light in a world of darkness: amidst the madness of the patients and the institution, he reminds the reader what true sanity is like. McMurphy is the patient sexually more fulfilled, but does not openly boast of his conquests because he knows that doing so would only discourage his companions. Instead, he puts his skills to use against Nurse Ratched. McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are opposites and must inevitably clash. One loves controlled order, while the other revels in total chaos. One is a ruthless megalomaniac, while the other is a fun-loving hustler. One is without sex, while the other can't get enough of it. This last difference is the most powerful weapon in McMurphy's arsenal: by alienating herself from sex, Nurse Ratched has forgotten that she herself can be subject to sexual control and humiliation. Throughout the book, McMurphy and Nurse Ratched remain locked in a power struggle over the patients. . However, McMurphy is fighting for the patients' physical and mental freedom, while Nurse Ratched tries to imprison them for the purposes of her own ego. The weapons they wield are as diverse as their objectives. Nurse Ratched uses insinuation and divide-and-conquer tactics to subvert McMurphy, while he uses what comes most naturally to him: his sexuality. The patients see Nurse Ratched as more than a woman, more than a human being, even. His asexual nature helps create this illusion, but by distancing himself from his sexual instincts he makes himself vulnerable. McMurphy constantly harangues Nurse Ratched, asking "if you didn't mind saying, what the actual inch-for-inch measurement was on those large breasts that she did her best to hide but never could." Later, "through the back of her uniform, [he] gave her a pinch that made her face as red as her hair." As a consequence of McMurphy's jokes, the patients' idea of ​​Nurse Ratched as an impregnable being ceases to exist, and with each sly comment from McMurphy the power structure changes slightly. At the end of the novel, this power is completely dispelled through McMurphy's last, desperate sacrifice for the sake of his friends: "he grabbed [Nurse Ratched] and tore her uniform to the hilt, screaming again when the two headed circles starting from his chest and swelling more and more." This act not only exposes Nurse Ratched as a human being, but also nullifies her power: patients will never again see her as the superhuman being they once thought she was. Much of the evidence for this theme is hidden in symbolism. A clear symbol of sexuality in the novel is McMurphy's boxers. In one of their many confrontations, McMurphy encounters Nurse Ratched wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, "charcoal black satin covered with large white whales with red eyes" and curiously similar to the Moby Dick figure. This is important because Moby Dick was often interpreted as aphallic symbol, and here it is representative of McMurphy's sexuality. The Moby Dick shorts also symbolize McMurphy's fight with Nurse Ratched, which mirrors Ahab's fight with the whale. Finally, many have interpreted Moby Dick as a sacred figure, much as McMurphy imitates Christ in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The shorts were originally given to McMurphy as a gift "by a student at Oregon State, a literature major... She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol." Another important symbol is the deck of cards that McMurphy plays throughout the novel. The package is the first item he presents to patients and the cards depict "fifty-two positions". Exactly what these paper depictions are is made clear by Cheswick's reaction: he's "already bug-eyed...what he sees on those papers isn't helping his condition." Besides being an obvious representation of McMurphy's open sexuality, the cards also reveal something about his character. This is no ordinary deck of cards; the package thus reveals McMurphy's nonconformist nature and need to shock, to be the center of attention. McMurphy's association with symbols doesn't end there. As he and the patients return from the fishing trip, he notices a little dress hanging from a tree, "a rag, yellow and black." The dress inspires him to tell the story of how he lost his virginity for the first time to a nine-year-old girl, whose dress ended up in the branches of a tree after McMurphy tossed it into the wind. McMurphy wears his sexuality like a dress in the wind, waving it proudly for all to see. Symbolism aside, this part of the novel is extremely important to both the theme of sexuality and the development of McMurphy's character. This insight into McMurphy's youth helps the reader understand where her unique personality originated, as stated by McMurphy himself: "[she] taught me to love, bless her sweet ass." He reminds the reader how important healthy sexuality is for a man's growth: the other patients had troubled sexual lives, and are now considered crazy. The situation is thus imbued with a strong dose of irony: the other patients were institutionalized due to an inactive or unhealthy sexual life, while McMurphy was institutionalized due to his hyperactive sexuality. Billy Bibbit is an insecure 34 year old virgin with a speech impediment. The root of his problems is his non-existent sex life, which has left him unable to mature and become a man. The blame for this falls not on Billy, but on his mother. Being treated like a child his entire life caused Billy to be overwhelmed by the complexities of the world, creating the foundation for his insecurity. In the one scene where his mother comes to visit him, it becomes obvious that Billy's mental condition was due to his mother's oppression: "Billy was talking about getting a wife and going to college someday. His mother laughed... .of such stupidity.” If Billy were younger, such a conversation might have seemed rational, but Billy is “thirty-one” and clearly no longer destined for college. Later in the novel, McMurphy helps Billy lose his virginity to Candy, a girl. prostitute who breaks into the hospital, thus eradicating his stutter and lifelong insecurity. The beautiful moment, however, is short-lived: after Nurse Ratched finds out what happened, she threatens to tell Billy's mother, sending him into a nervous breakdown: "He was shaking his head like a child who's been promised a whipped just as a willow tree is just being cut down." Soon after he is taken away, the others receive news that he has "cut his throat". Billy's suicide is not entirely surprising. He behaves in a waymuch like a child facing punishment, blindly trying to escape guilt and fear. Indeed, all of the hospital's patients have had a powerful and emasculating female figure in their lives. In Harding's case, that was his wife. Harding was institutionalized because he is homosexual. Although no one explicitly reveals this information, the reader can infer it both from her first conversation with McMurphy ("I have been accused... of having relations with my male friends, of holding the cigarette in an affected manner..." ) and the description of the visit from his wife ("It's about some of Harding's friends who he wishes would stop going around the house looking for him... The bourgeois with the beautiful long hair combed so perfectly and the floppy cuffs such a beautiful reversal"). What is not known is whether he was homosexual before or after marriage, although there is strong evidence to suggest the latter. Harding claims to have been intimidated by his wife, who is in fact a very beautiful woman who attracts a lot of attention. Harding also states that he was afraid of not being able to satisfy her. Evidently his fears had swamped any love he might have felt for her or any other woman, causing his interests to wander elsewhere. For Harding there is no quick fix as in Billy's case, but in the final pages of the novel he states that he wants to come to terms with his sexuality before confronting society again. The novel's narrator, Chief Bromden, also had a traumatizing experience with a woman: his mother. She was able to slowly undermine all trust and power in both him and his proud father and tribal leader, Tee-Ah-Millatoona ("The Pine That Stands Tallest on the Mountain"). Only his last name, Bromden, is mentioned in the book, a sign that the Chief is trying to forget his suffocating presence. He imposes his surname on the Chief's father and himself: a symbol of the lifelong influence he has on their lives and a direct usurpation of Tee-Ah-Millatoona's role as head of the family. His descent into the sorry drunkard he becomes is a consequence of his mother's oppressive harassment, which the chief says "made him too young to fight anymore" and ultimately convinced him to sell the valley that was home to him and the his ancestors. The Chief's mother can be seen as a tool of a mechanistic society, infiltrating one of nature's last paradises in an attempt to conquer and exploit it. We know that the Chief eventually went insane while fighting in World War II because he was interned shortly after the war ended. the war ended, but his perceptive abilities had already been significantly weakened by his mother. When McMurphy asks the chief how big his mother was, he replies that although a carnival worker once told him she was "five foot seven and one hundred and thirty pounds," he guesses she was bigger than his father, "twice as big about him. "Sexual violence is another theme present in the book. When Nurse Ratched pretends to get McMurphy's name wrong and calls him "McMurry," he delves into the story of "an uncle whose name was Hallahan...he once went with a woman who kept acting like she didn't remember his name well." and kept calling him Hooligan just to get in the way. This went on for months before he stopped it." When the doctor asks him how he stopped it, McMurphy replies, "I keep Uncle Hallahan's method a strict secret, you see, in case I need to use it myself someday. itself". Obviously it refers to rape. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, rape is depicted as a last resort for men who wish to assert their "natural" authority over women. The first time this themeappears in the novel is during Chief Bromden's memories of Taber. Without warning, Nurse Ratched's friends "catch Taber in the outhouse and drag him into the mattress room," where Nurse Ratched is waiting, "smearing Vaseline on a long needle." Shortly thereafter, he reappears, "wiping the needle on a scrap of Taber's trousers." Significantly, she "[leaves] the jar of Vaseline in the room" for the guards to use on Maxwell. Symbolically it is as if she had raped him. Not only is Nurse Ratched able to nullify men's ultimate weapon on women, but she is also capable of using it against them. The last time this theme appears in the novel is during McMurphy's final sacrifice. Before his hospitalization, he had never been violent in his sexual relationships, contrary to what the hospital believed. The hospital atmosphere, however, with its twisted absence of sexuality and horrific, cruel psychological ordeals, forces McMurphy to resort to sexual violence as a last resort. She rebels against the cruel matriarch, tearing Nurse Ratched's uniform. In a sense, McMurphy must resort to the "Uncle Hallahan" method to bring about change: in the end, the mysterious prophecy turns out to be true. Another important theme in the novel is castration. The most memorable use of this theme occurs during Rawler's suicide: he bleeds to death after cutting his testicles. Particularly evocative is the phrase with which the Chief concludes the anecdote: "What makes people so impatient is what I can't understand, all the boy had to do was wait." The phrase can be interpreted in many different ways. First, the Chief might suggest that the institution itself would kill him in the long term: being classified as "disturbed", Rawler would have been subjected to electroshock therapy and other operations that would most likely have led to his death. However, the boss could also have meant that Rawler would eventually be neutered by the institution. The sexless nature of the hospital would lead any man to mental, if not physical, castration. This theme becomes even more important towards the end of the novel, after McMurphy has undergone three electroshock treatments. Nurse Ratched, seeing no change in McMurphy's behavior, suggests that they "consider an operation" - by which she means a lobotomy. Before he can continue, however, McMurphy retorts that "it wouldn't do to cut them up; I have another pair in the nightstand." As usual, he jokes about the nurse's serious announcement, pretending to believe that they want to castrate him. Both operations, however, free man from his individuality, his freedom of choice and his pride. Kesey's implication is that the two operations are symbolically identical. There is much debate about the function of this theme in the novel. Many have simply labeled the novel as offensive to women, but the truth is much more complex. Kesey's negative portrayal of women is not intended to undermine the female sex. To effectively convey the extreme differences between nurses and patients, Kesey had to separate them not only morally, but also physically. By dividing them by gender, Kesey creates a world in which women can be immediately identified as "evil" and male characters as "good". The idea of ​​a society completely ruled by women is extremely foreign to us (and would have been even more unimaginable to Kesey's contemporaries), thus underlining that the hospital environment is twisted and unnatural. Perhaps anticipating the reaction to his novel, Kesey's inclusion of a character meant to discredit the theory that he was blatantly misogynistic. The Japanese nurse who treats..