Nurse Ratched

Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, the Joker, Hans Gruber. Odds are good you'll find at least one of these on anyone's top villains list. Their laurels are well-deserved. But I want to talk about a villain who isn't given her due: Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. My impressions are informed more by the book than the 1975 movie starring Louise Fletcher. Her unique villainy comes through more clearly via Ken Kesey’s prose than it does through the visual medium.

When the hero McMurphy gets committed to the psych ward, his stay becomes a battle of wills: He's big, brash, and rebellious; Nurse Ratched is cold, controlling, and manipulative. McMurphy mounts a campaign to break her vice-like grip on the patients and the hospital staff. Through sheer pig-headedness, he's mostly successful. He wins the patients' rights to play cards, to watch the World Series, and to leave the hospital to go fishing.

Nurse Ratched makes these allowances, but her will remains unbroken. Through it all she exudes maternal patience and forbearance. She doesn't let McMurphy bring her down to his level, doesn't validate the threat he poses to her authority. He recognizes this, and an unsettling feeling sets in. He begins to question his motives. Why is he here, and what ultimately does he want?

Put simply, his motive is to be free. At the beginning of the story he escaped military service by disobeying orders and acting like a lunatic. Now to be free he must prove he's sane. His antics in the psych ward don't help that cause. He reaches the conclusion that, to be free, he must submit to Nurse Ratched. Alas, submission, to become like the weak-minded patients to whom he's a hero, would mean the death of his spirit.

The turning point of the book is when McMurphy finds out all the patients are there by choice. Why? Here it's helpful to look closer at Nurse Ratched. She's about 50 years old, never married, and, by the inmates' description of her, quite beautiful in her prime. But she is completely asexual. She's not the oppressive authoritarian McMurphy's used to dealing with, but an unconditional caregiver. She rules over the patients, all men, as if they're her children. They're free to leave the psych ward when they're able and ready, but they choose not to because they're comfortable in their confinement.

Ask any empty-nester what the hardest part of raising children is, and she'll tell you it’s letting them leave when they’ve grown up. It is with a heavy heart she watches them strike out on their own. But if they choose to stay for whatever reason, she would understand. She would not push them away. The “failure to launch” phenomenon has two guilty parties: the young men who don't grow up, and the mothers who tacitly discourage them from leaving.

What makes Nurse Ratched a wonderful villain is she has motives, too, as strong as McMurphy's. She needs the patients to need her. So she conditions them by instilling affection, guilt, and fear to need her so before long they have no desire to be free. Thus she robs them of any chance at real rehabilitation. I won't spoil the ending, but how she finally deals with McMurphy will cost you an hour of sleep just thinking about it.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.