When Ken Kesey introduced Nurse Ratched in his acclaimed 1962 novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," she became an archetype for cold, cruel and heartless women, seemingly unfeeling and unmoved by normal human emotions — at least according to the novel's deliberately unreliable protagonist-narrator and the other patients in the ward. The character known as "Big Nurse" was portrayed in much the same fashion in Miloš Forman's film adaptation of Kesey's novel just over a decade later, with Louise Fletcher bringing the joyless woman to life.
Neither, however, offered readers or viewers any understanding of Mildred Ratched herself or of her motivations; her depiction in the 1960s and the 1970s was completely one-dimensional — an Oedipal authority figure into which the unreliable narrator and sympathetic audiences had little insight and whose physical, sexualized humiliation they cheer.
Continue reading at NBC Think.