Nurse Ratched Essay

A former forces nurse, Nurse Ratched represents the despotic mechanization, de benevolentization, and emasculation of modern societyin Bromdens words, the Combine. Her nickname is Big Nurse, which sounds like Big Brother, the name used in George Orwells novel 1984 to refer to an oppressive and all-knowing authority. Bromden describes Ratched as organism like a machine, and her behavior fits this description even her name is reverberative of a mechanical tool, sounding like both ratchet and wretched. She enters the novel, and the ward, with a gust of cold. Ratched has complete control over every aspect of the ward, as well as almost complete control over her experience emotions. In the first few pages we see her show her hideous self-importance to Bromden and the aides, only to regain her doll-like composure before any of the patients catch a glimpse. Her ability to present a false self suggests that the mechanistic and oppressive forces in society gain ascendance through the dish onesty of the powerful. Without world aware of the oppression, the quiet and docile slowly become weakened and step by step are subsumed.Nurse Ratched does possess a nonmechanical and undeniably human feature in her large bosom, which she conceals as best she can below a heavily starched uniform. Her large breasts both exude sexuality and underline her role as a twisted mother figure for the ward. She is equal to act like an angel of mercy while at the kindred time shaming the patients into submission she knows their weak spots and exactly where to peck. The patients try to interest her during the Group Meetings by airing their dirtiest, darkest secrets, and then they feel deeply sheepish for how she made them act, even though they have done nothing. She maintains her power by the strategic use of shame and guilt, as well as by a determination to divide and conquer her patients.McMurphy manages to ruffle Ratched because he plays her gage he picks up on her weak spots right a way. He uses his overt sexuality to throw her off her machinelike track, and he is not taken in by her thin facade of compassion or her falsely therapeutic tactics. When McMurphy rips her shirt open at theend of the novel, he symbolically exposes her hypocrisy and deceit, and she is never able to regain power.