How does Nurse Ratched use the figure of a mother to maintain control within Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

This question requires a direct character analysis in regards to a particular concept or role so try to focus on pulling ideas from the text that align with the concept you're asked to explore. In this case, you want to focus on ideas that relate to the role of motherhood. You could explore this question in a multiple of ways; you could firstly identify how Nurse Ratched's relationship to her patients emulates that of the role of the mother directly and pick out an answer along the lines of this: Nurse Ratched mirrors the mother role to force the patients into a position of dependency by scorning them as if they were ‘children on the playground’ (p. 145). She adopts the position of a surrogate mother, and through this role, Nurse Ratched hijacks the maternal figure in order to gain power by allowing her to control and penalise the patients as if they were her own children–the ‘rules and restrictions’ (p. 170) that Nurse Ratched enforces emulates a mother’s discipline over her own child. Or, you could also identify how Nurse Ratched uses the lack of maternal guidance in her patients' childhoods to ensure control over her patients: Nurse Ratched uses the figure of the mother as a reinforcement of her own authority. she criticises the ‘foolish lenience on the part of [her patient’s] parents’ (p. 170), arguing that their real parents allowed their children to get away with ‘flouting the rules of society’ (p. 170). This is thrown into sharp relief at the end of the novel as Nurse Ratched uses humiliation and the threat of maternal intervention to suppress a rebellious Billy Bibbit, with disastrous consequences.