The Struggle of Patriarchy against ‘the juggernaut of modern matriarchy’ in Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Abstract

Human societies are always entrapped in internal conflicts for power. In the similar internal conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy, men can outsmart women historically reducing them to the secondary positions in the male-dominated society. However, the coming of the waves of feminist thinking threatened the male authority and power and justified equality and freedom for women. The conventional and stereotypical roles of women were debated and the radical feminism violently challenged male authoritarian control over society; it questioned and problematized the specific secondary gender roles imposed upon women by the patriarchal society and aimed to reverse the principles of male dominance and subordination of women to men as encapsulated in the binary patriarchy and matriarchy. These movements prompted certain male writers to come up with a certain agenda to allegorize this struggle. Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the many that allegories that struggle between a belligerent patriarchy suffocating under a devastating combined power of the juggernaut of matriarchy. The only way whereby the patriarchy can survive against that juggernaut of matriarchy is by using physical and sexual violence. Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoos’ Nest presents the authoritarian matriarchal rule, power and control in addition to its methods of punishment and therapies by paralleling it with the theories of behaviourists psychology. The novel dreams of freedom and emancipation for men from the ruthless Nurse Ratched, ‘Big Mama’, who symbolizes the matriarchal control and authority over men in the ward.