Taking sides: Great Notion Vs Cuckoo's Nest

rote wokescold take

like, the patients ability to objectify ratched and the other nurses is shown to be a key to their liberation. it's a very clearly stated, not subtextual.

harding is the character who theorizes about this, how modern society is a matriarchy. i'm struggling with how to approach this. i want to say that the misogyny of the book shows the limitations of kesey and his milieu, their romantic critique of postwar america. and i have said things like this in class.. but it kind of falls flat. they seem confused, like i am siding with nurse ratched, a person who punishes unruly patients by giving them lobotomies.

getting high school students to see works in a broader social/historical context is always tough, even students who are good at analyzing what is going on in the narrative itself, the characters, the symbolism, the themes

I've come up against quite a bit of indignation irl and a bit on here for apparently misinterpreting what the book very clearly spells out. I know other readers with similar reactions have also been told for years that they/we must have been misreading something because we got the wrong message from it. I consider it a bad book (it doesn't work in the way it's supposed to) despite approving of some of the (other) things it was trying to do

I can't begin to imagine how to teach something so complex - I assume there is a stock interpretation which downplays the race/sex stuff which some teachers might be (and have been) happy to stick with. I'm glad you're trying to tackle more than that but it sounds tough

the best way to understand the book is as an artifact of the beat/hippie movement. the limitations of those movements are also the problems with the book: its vision of freedom is too one-dimensional, and too attached to a romantic idea of "natural man" and his corruption (in this book, explicitly emasculation) by "society."

the book is good in its depiction of how the nurse uses therapeutic language to create an atmosphere of shame and mutual suspicion, a subtle mechanism of control. but it's wrong in its apparent prescription for this repressive atmosphere, which seems kind of nihilistic honestly, a total giving-over to libidinal and transgressive energies. what's missing is a real vision of ethics that transcends these power games.

i'm going to try to find some feminist critiques of the book to assign to my students, something that is penetrating but accessible enough, and then have the students debate this issue. the sexism in the novel is too central to ignore.