A Woman Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kessey's portrayal of women in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is offensively intriguing. From a woman's perspective, I find Kessey's depiction of woman as stereotypical and attacking. Nonetheless, I accept this adds mysteriousness to the novel's feminine characters and offers a more accurate setting for the degradation of men within the mental hospital.

Kessey depicts the Big Nurse as this diplomatic, controlled, probably hair-sprayed woman who is able to control a number of outcasts all by herself. An admirable woman, one might think, but the Big Nurse slightly more complex than that. The way in which  her facial expression twitches when her authority is questioned or the way in which that Alice-in-Wonderland-cat-smile of hers seems to be forever hammered below her nose gives the reader an underlying hint of her passive-aggressiveness and the insanity within that. Kessey portrays the Big Nurse as the woman in charge; as the ball-cutter in a hospital of men.

I thought Kessey had only portrayed the Big Nurse as a control-freak, manipulative harpy until Harding's wife came along. Vera stands out to me as a new-rich woman who sleeps around and who, by means of her manipulating skills, got poor old Harding to join the ward. Her coldness reminds me of the Big Nurse. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Harding, or Vera, has also some sort of passive-aggressive nature to herself; she is also a ball-cutter. In roughly two pages, Vera is able to 1) Tell McMurphy to call her Vera, for she hates Mrs. Harding, 2) Accuse Harding of his inability to have "enough", and 3) Imply that the other men that come to visit her with the excuse of looking for her husband are more manly than Harding.

The connection between the Big Nurse and Mrs. Harding lies in their passive-aggressive, manipulative nature. It makes the reader want to smack both of them in the face.

What surprised me after noticing how these two woman resemble one another was that these are roughly the only two woman Kessey makes reference to, or rather, relevantly describes. But why would Kessey want to depict woman so coldly?

Personally, I have known more Big Nurses than Big He-Nurses. But that still does not give a solid reason as to why Kessey may have chosen women as his way of embodying everything that annoys mankind. Perhaps it is because women like the Big Nurse require smart and clever men; strong men may quiet down another man, but strong men have nothing against even the tiniest of tyrannic women.
This may be Kessey's attempt to target societal norms, which cannot be altered by the strong but by the smart. Only he who succeeds in soothing the Big Nurse's ego will achieve a fog-less  panorama, unlike the one who tried beating the woman down and ended up in Shock therapy.