One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Identity Essay

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Gender and identity is understood by Virginia Woolf to be omnipresent- she famously quoted in A Room of One’s Own that “the history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” Gender inequity is not a singular concept, but rather an inimical interconnection amid both the male and female characters in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Enduring Love, as well as a recurring motif in Plath’s “extant” poetry. It is possible to conclude from these texts that lack of gender equilibrium is coerced by power exercised erroneously, therefore provoking an incursion of a battle between the sexes and a demand for political, social, economic and environmental emancipation of women.…show more content…
Family presents itself as the “matrix” for cultural, social, political and economic upbringing. In this light, it is questionable whether Chief Bromden can retain his obsolete identity and retrieve “the name of the father” whilst grounded in a family that has declined that name, and instead enjoy his white mother’s last name. This deepens the search for Chief Bromden’s lost male Native American integrity entombed along the bottomless Columbia River. By contrast, Sylvia Plath’s poem Ariel can be interpreted as an exploration of the notion of identity, through biological rather than mechanical imagery, through the use of a dominant metaphor of a horse. Plath, in real life, own a horse, which she had named “Ariel”. The poem explores powerlessness coerced by weakened, “split”, “substanceless” and “dead” identity. Plath speaks of “nigger-eye berries”, which, in other words, are blackberries. There is a sense of substitution of the term “black” with “nigger-eye” in order to demonstrate a sense of voyeurism that makes her impotent; it is because of this “substanceless” identity that it gets “hook[ed]” back to these voyeurs. In like manner, racism is striking in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as The Aides adversely characterise black people as menial and subservient to white people which is evident through the organisation of jobs in the ward: Doctor Spivey and Nurse Ratched enjoy an advanced career which requires a high level of education whilst The Aides, which are also known as the “black boys”, are contrived into low skilled work due to refused equal rights and freedom upon African Americans during the 1960’s regardless of the newly amended U.S.
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