Fixing Men: Castration, Impotence, and Masculinity in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

Abstract

This article examines the changing perceptions of ideal masculinity in post World War Two America. Ken Kesey, representative of a growing number of antagonistic male writers in the 1950s and 1960s, uses the mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a microcosm for a contemporary society that he believes feminizes men by not allowing them an outlet for their primal sexual urges. Nurse Ratched—a sterile, distant, and oppressive feminine force who psychologically castrates the male patients—represents Kesey's fears of a cold war era that fosters an impotent, feminine American masculinity through a climate of fear and conformity. McMurphy's violence toward Ratched becomes analogous to a rape act, meant to free the inmates from an impotent manhood, but his subsequent lobotomy undermines the possibility that such a freedom can be obtained in such an environment.