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The Fertility Myth of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, takes place on a psychiatric ward where two almost deity like central figures, struggle for control over the ward’s denizens. This ward becomes a world within a world, or microcosm, where the patients have become devoid of life because of the presence of a strong central female figure who has taken away their lives through the loss of freedom. This world is a “little world inside that is a made to scale prototype of the big world” (Kesey 48). This independence has been taking away with threats of electro shock therapy and the castration of the mind, lobotomy. When one loses life, they die, so in turn the ward has become a “dead world” because of this loss of life. The Nurse, the ruler of the ward, uses a vise like control to control the ward according to her jurisdiction and takes away any vestige of masculinity, freedom, and life the patients once had. She is repeatedly referred to as a “mother” tending to her helpless children and takes the form of a goddess figure throughout the novel. The patients believe they cannot survive without her help and on some level they have accepted the need for a mothe