Essay Comparing One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest And The Crucible

The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the play The Crucible, both display a woman’s ability to manipulate men in societies where they were virtually powerless. Kesey used Nurse Ratched in his novel as an example of a female manipulator in the time period of the late 1950s or early 1960s where women were still seen as subservient citizens that should be in the home. Miller on the other hand, used the character Abigail as a manipulator of men in his play which was set in a Puritan society of the late 1600s where women had a small fraction of the rights that women had during the time of Kesey’s novel. In both of these literary works both women which were antagonists, used their “power” to manipulate the men around them to achieve their own personal goals and compensate for their powerless positions as women in their respective time periods and societies. In the society of Kesey’s novel’s setting, women had no where close to the kind of authority over men that Nurse Ratched had in the ward. If a man challenged a woman the same way that McMurphy challenged Nurse Ratched in the novel, the woman would merely have to …show more content…
In attempting to achieve her objective of being with John Proctor, she utilized a power that wasn’t hers and was the cause of many innocent people dying. She attempted to justify her actions to John Proctor by explaining how in love she was with him and that she just wanted him to love her, but to no avail. He was utterly disgusted by the fact that she was so morally flawed to not have the urge to stop manipulating the court, the people of Salem, and end the false accusations that were costing innocent people (including his wife) their lives. When Abigail realized that her primary goal wasn’t going to be achieved, she no longer had a reason to manipulate Salem and the court and left with no