Keesan P

Pascal 1

Mr. Davis

th
Pre­AP Literature 11

11/11/2015

Sadists And Their Destruction
Ken Kesey, Edith Wharton, and Tom Schulman all have created literary works involving the sadistic enforcer of conformity. These characters take pleasure in the terror and pain they instill in those who reside under them and have been also shown to go to quite drastic and destructive measures to ensure the conformity of the populace they command, even completely destroying someone’s life for “the good of all.” Within these works Kesey, Wharton, and
Schulman use the sadistic Nurse Ratched, Zeena, and Headmaster Nolan to show their use of drastic methods to enforce conformity and the destruction of characters’ lives to show this.
Nurse Ratched takes a certain sadistic motherly pleasure in her position of conformist enforcement on the ward. As soon as her entrance in the first scene Chief Bromden interprets her expression during her walk to her office as being “pleased and peaceful with the thought”(Kesey
4) of her duties for the day, which involve watching over the patients of the ward. She orders and controls the patients in a manner that diminishes their masculinity, and she takes pleasure in the fear that she causes and the power she commands. Another instance of this is when Nurse
Ratched remembers the time when she had a patient named Taber (who she eventually made docile through electroshock therapy treatments and is considered a successfully cured patient):
I recall some years back we had a man, a Mr. Taber, on the ward, and he was an intolerable Ward Manipulator. For a while." She looks up from her work, needle half filled in

Pascal 2 front of her face like a little wand. Her eyes get far­off and pleased with the memory. "Mistur
Tay­bur," she says. (Kesey 27)
Clearly Nurse Ratched feels pleasure throughout her endeavors as head Nurse of the ward as shown through this moment in the novel as she is “pleased” at the thought of her success, although her success brought the patient Taber much grief as the therapy rendered him docile.
Manuel Munoz regards Nurse Ratched as “more as a networked monster” and that once
McMurphy shows up her visualization of being a “soul­sucking representation of authority gets confirmed”(Munoz 669). This comes clear as she sucks the soul out of patients and this power of authority also fuels her sensations of pleasure. And to suck the life out of those she resides above, she uses vicious methods to control those that are under her such as shaming, torture and harmful totally uncalled­for procedures, “And since it Monday, boys, why don’t we get a good is head start on the week by shaving poor Mr. Bromden first this morning….and see if we can’t avoid some of the ­ ah ­ disturbance he tends to cause,”(Kesey 6). Nurse Ratched feels as if she is a mother to all the patients on the ward and like a mother she rejoices in knowing that she has the power to control what the patients do and be their guardian and teacher. However, with this feeling she also takes up the notion that anything must be done to take care of her patients even if it is not necessarily a good thing such as the moment when she attacks Harding during the meeting, inevitably inducing a shaming party in which the patients start to gang up on Harding and without realizing completely tarnish his feelings.
As well as Big Nurse, Zeena in Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome takes pleasure in the stress she puts upon Mattie and Ethan. During the scene in which Zeena and Ethan are discussing the

Pascal 3 terms of her health and the topic of Mattie arises in the discussion, Zeena’s pleasure can be seen clearly: He stopped short, not grasping what he heard. “Mattie's board less?” he began. Zeena laughed. It was an odd unfamiliar sound he did not remember ever having heard her laugh before. ‘You didn't suppose I was going to keep two girls, did you ? No wonder you were scared at the expense!’. (Wharton 114)
It shows how Zeena deliberately plans on replacing Mattie with a new girl and the way she takes pleasure in the fact that Ethan becomes dumbfounded and distressed at this fact. This sadist nature of Zeena is clearly evident at the end of the novel
Ethan Frome when the ending character
Lockwood that originally appeared in the novel’s introduction, walks into the Frome household and sees that now Mattie is confined to silence and a sad armchair whereas Zeena is now the one up and about taking care of Ethan and Mattie after their suicide attempt that left them both crippled: “
One of them, on my appearing, raised her tall bony figure from her seat, not as if to welcome me­for she threw me no more than a brief glance of surprise­but simply to set about preparing the meal which Frome's absence had delayed.”(Wharton 97). It cannot be a coincidence that now that Mattie and Ethan are crippled because of the terror she has inflicted upon them and she has somehow completely gotten better and able to handle house duties. It is as if she was waiting for the moment at which Ethan and Mattie completely met their downfall to rise out of her self­proclaimed shell to continue her reign as an able­bodied motherly figure to both of her housemates. This peculiar change clearly shows that Zeena takes pleasure in her terror and truly awakens after seeing the fruits of her labor.

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Headmaster Nolan is shown as a man who takes pleasure in applying discipline and enforcing conformity throughout the all boy school that he runs. During the scene when he states, “Wipe that smirk off your face. If you think, Mr. Dalton, that you're the first to try to get thrown out of this school, think again. Others have had similar notions and have failed just as surely as you will fail. Assume the position” and then goes on to deliver Charlie’s earned punishment and after each hit it through his expression it seems as if he feels a sense of satisfaction through the pain he is delivering and looks towards Charlie to determine if he is delivering the correct amount of pain that he wishes to inflict. He shows a clear sense of pleasure from his drastic and old­fashioned method of punishment ­ Paddling. Nolan also shows this expression during the scene in which he has an angry fit and states “I said leave Mr. Keating” and then goes on to show a slight expression of delight at the fact that he enforced his will and terror upon Keating once again.These scenes reinforce the stereotype in these works that the ones in control take pleasure and enjoy the terror that they put upon those under them.
“Big Nurse,” or Nurse Ratched, is also portrayed as one willing to take great lengths to preserve the the nature of her “utopian” society she has built over the years as head Nurse of the ward. A direct example of this is during the moment leading up to Billy Bibbit’s death, where
Nurse Ratched is seen scolding Billy and verbally attacking him like a mother disciplining her child: “The nurse’s tongue clucked in her bony throat. ‘Oh, Billy Billy Billy ­ I’m so ashamed for you’ ”(Kesey 314). She mimics pain in such a way that she seems like she isn’t the villain and the pain is the result of the doings of the other patients. In fact she is the one who attacks the very soft spot that leads up to being the ultimate demise of her subjects: “ ‘What worries me
Billy,’ she said­­I could hear the change in her voice ­ ‘is how your poor mother is going to take

Pascal 5 this.’ She got the response she was after. Billy flinched and put his hand to his cheek like he’d been burned with acid”(Kesey 314). Ratched’s drastic and destructive actions are characteristic to any dictator, and she has no remorse for her deeds as she refuses blame for the end results. She commits these terrible acts for her own selfish intentions and without regard for what will come of it, just to fulfill her needs for pleasure and relieve her mind of any confusion and anxiety that she feels about the state of her society and to please her ideas for the perfect utopian society.
Another example of this is her tragic ending of McMurphy’s troubles by having her doctors attempt a lobotomy on him, all in order to restore her reign as supreme ruler of the ward.
Although Zeena for the most part has no direct destructive acts against those around her such as Ethan and Mattie, she indirectly causes the near death of both of them through the anguish and terror she imposes on them through her actions and demeanor. For example, Zeena treats Ethan like he was below her and never shows affection, “When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked”(Wharton 38). She only gives Ethan grief and sorrow as well as instilling a fear in both him and Mattie. During the scene when Ethan and Mattie are alone and mention Zeena, they both freeze up in fear of even the idea of Zeena: “The name threw a chill between them, and they stood a moment looking sideways at each other..”(Wharton 44).
Although not entirely evident that this will cause the drastic attempt at suicide, this and other instances indicate Zeena is terrifying hold on Ethan and Mattie will inevitably cause them to go mad and attempt suicide to escape Zeena’s reign on the household.

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Unlike Zeena, who uses subtle tactics to inflict her terror, Headmaster Nolan blatantly goes out of his way to enforce his reign and has no mercy when it comes to dishing out the necessary consequences to those he believes to be jeopardizing his perfect utopia, as the others do. In this instance, Nolan accuses Mr. Keating of causing the untimely death of one of his students Neil Perry through the “blatant abuse of his position as teacher,” while throughout the movie Keating has only been trying to encourage Neil to be his own person, and although not directly stated in the movie, Nolan destroys Keating’s career as a teacher at the school and fires him and most certainly spread the word about Mr. Keating throughout different connections to various schools, given the nature of Nolan’s character. Headmaster Nolan is so strict and merciless that when his ideals are being challenged he goes so far as to not only deny that his practices of conformity are most certainly detrimental to his students, but to also accuse one of his employees of being the cause of the death and also forcibly end their career; this goes to show how destructive Nolan is and how power that is enjoyed can be used to destroy others with ease without any sense of remorse.
The works
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ethan Frome, and Dead Poets Society
,
plainly display the recurring stereotype among the conformists that they will take pleasure in their work and go to great lengths to preserve it. Big Nurse, Zeena, and Nolan all take pleasure in enforcing conformity, albeit in a few different ways, but they all take pleasure from the punishment of originality. As well as taking pleasure in their work, they also happily go to great lengths to preserve it if provoked or defied, and they all share methods that result in the complete destruction of those that need to be disciplined or controlled. Therefore, these works clearly

Pascal 7 show aspects of villainous characters that are common in literature and provide plain examples to provide readers with the necessary pieces to come to this conclusion.

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Works Cited
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Leonard, Ethan Hawke. Touchstone Pictures, 1989. DVD.
Dead Poets Society
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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Kesey, Ken.
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
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Kingsley, Susan, and Edith Wharton.
Ethan Frome
. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.
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Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Southern Review
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