The Insanity of Venus and Mars

In reading the final chapters of The Bell Jar could not help but compare Plath’s criticism of the mental health industry with another novel that has its own critique of the mental health industry by Ken Kesey called One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Both novelists speak on the subject with credibility, as we all know Plath was a psychiatric patient and Kesey worked the night shifts in the psychiatric ward of a veteran’s hospital. Most of the similarities are found when Esther goes to the first mental hospital under the care of Dr. Gordon. Kesey’s Nurse Ratched and Plath’s Dr. Gordon serve as representative models of health employees who are insensitive and authoritarian. Even more interesting than this is the theme of gender that plays in the comparison of these two characters. Chief Bromden, the male narrator in the Cuckoo’s Nest, often tends to describe the insanity of the male patients as a matter of emasculation at the hands of overpowering women such as Nurse Ratched, the head nurse of their ward. Plath writes a very similar plot structure with a vice versa of gender in regards to Dr. Gordon. Joan and Esther both tend to describe the general insensitivity of male psychiatrists. The reason both narrators dislike these health employees is because these employees represent the external factors in these narrators’ environments that drove them to insanity in the first place. Esther doesn’t like Dr. Gordon because as a man he could never understand Esther’s female identity crisis and his insensitivity reminds her of the misunderstood, distrustful, and violent relationships she’s had with men before. In Kesey’s novel many oof the patients have warped sexual identities because of past relationships with women. Taking in the role of gender and mental health institutions, I think it is plausible to say that both Plath and Kesey would have strong feelings that mental health patients are better treated when being helped by people of their own gender.