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Adam asked this question about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:
I have long thought of this book as one of my favorites, but noticed some heavy racist and misogynistic undertones when I re-read it. Much of this was left out of the film. Does old fashioned sexism sully an otherwise great work of literature?
Peter Anderson Unfortunately, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's shelf life may have expired and that is simply a shame.

Kesey's criticism embraced the notion of what …moreUnfortunately, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's shelf life may have expired and that is simply a shame.

Kesey's criticism embraced the notion of what Michel Foucault coined the "invisible forms of discipline" that control society and keep us from being our truest selves, that keep us prisoners to the false constructs in our society. And the people who are the biggest victims of it are non-whites and women.

These invisible forms of discipline show up in two symbols- Chief's "combine" and in the "control panel" that Chief ultimately unloosens and throws the through the window to gain his freedom- brilliance that control becomes the means that destroys itself.

And whose thoughts and ideas created these "invisible forms of discipline" created this conformity and power of the late 1950's and early and 1960's we had to follow or be labelled a misfit that Kesey is so critical of? Ummmm. The white patriarchal power structure that women and people of color are fighting today.

Consider: The hero of the story is a mixed person of color who at the end of the novel has shed the control of the white world calling him crazy. Consider, Chief is going back to check on his buddies in the tribe too see if any are still there after the "government tried to buy their right to be Indians."

Kesey wanted to give Native Americans their story back.

But why hammer on women and African Americans? I would argue he is not doing that.

Consider: That, aside from the Chief, the characters who have been victimized most by "the combine," by the man, by these de-humanizing white patriarchal forms of discipline, are The Big Nurse, and The African American orderlies. All semblance of humanity and who they are as individuals has been crushed and twisted by the white power structure "the combine."

As such, Candy', the whore (which is not used as a pejorative by Chief) and her sexual expression stands as a foil to Big Nurse's sexual repression.

Indeed if a whore is a person who sells their body for money than anyone with a job is a whore, pointing out the false patriarchal construct telling women (and men too) which parts of their bodies they can use to make money.

For me, the most tragic scene is Chief's remembrance of being a young man visiting a cotton mill prior to his high school football team. playing a team in California A young African American woman comes up to talk with him and they flirt and clearly are taken with each other when she digs her hands into his wrist and says:

"do take me, big boy. Outa this here mill, outa this town, outa this life. Take me to some ol' duck blind someplace."

She wants out, but it is clearly impossible for them to run off as white pariarchal society, the combine will simply not let a man who presents as Native American run off and marry an African American woman without repercussions.

McMurphy is quiet clearly a Christ symbol. Ask yourself for whose sins is he paying? The patients or the white patriarchal power structure that made them think there was something wrong with the patients?

In the 1980's Betty Friedan considered the movie Tootsie a landmark film because it showed the indignities and indeed danger that women go through on a day to day basis. But it did so by putting a white man pretending to be a white woman in society. Sometimes when we put the people in power in the place of those being crushed by society it has more resonance for everyone, but most importantly, more resonance and realization for the powerful who need to see how the rest are living under their yoke.



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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
by Ken Kesey
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