RUR Gender Quotes

Helena experiences a lot of sexism in R.U.R. In some cases, Čapek seems to criticize that sexism; at other times the play seems to endorse it. Here, Helena herself is criticizing the sexism. Domin is a blowhard who keeps interrupting her—in part, it seems like, because he sees her as an empty-headed girl. Domin's desire for mastery, most obvious in his creation of robot slaves, extends to his treatment of women as well.

Who cursed them though? Why aren't there any female scientists? The curse here seems to actually be inequality. Men have created a system in which they are lords at the top, towering over servants and women alike. And then they complain because they feel lonely.

Alquist is later presented as sympathetic, but here he appears to be asking Helena to give herself to the scientists, as if she is a robot who can be passed around and owned.

Everybody thinks Helena is a silly girl, including Helena herself. The robots have no gender, supposedly, but the men and women in the play are very much defined by gender. The guys are all scientists, and Helena is the idealistic fool. It's almost as if the genderless robots push Čapek to assert, over and over, the importance of gender. Helena has to be a "silly girl" because the play has created all these robots for whom gender doesn't need to matter that much.

This is bizarre. Domin says Helena has to marry one of the five supervisors. Her consent is utterly beside the point—she has no choice, like a robot. But the men, too, are seen as interchangeable, as if they're all exactly alike—like robots. The sequence is probably supposed to be funny (sexism! funny! ha ha). But it's also a bit uncanny; it's one of the moments in the play where you do get the sense that people are turning into nonhuman things, or that they were nonhuman things all along.

Robots aren't brutes, of course. Domin is saying he is a manly man who grabs life by the tonsils and makes snuffling, beasty noises because he is a man and that's what men do. To be a man is to be something of a jerk—and force women to marry you as well, apparently. Manliness is defined through force… which will become a problem when you get robots who are stronger than you.

The advent of the robots has caused a breakdown in the gendered order of things. When you can make all the robots you want, you don't need women to have babies. Of course, Helena didn't exactly want to get married, and you can imagine a woman saying, "Hey, I don't need to have kids, I don't need to build or do anything—this is kind of awesome." The worry about the robots is in part a worry about female equality, it seems like. If everyone is the same, will the human race die out?

Here's another example of Domin being a jerk to Helena. In this case, it comes back to haunt him, since she has important information. In fact, his refusal to tell her what's going on ends up leading to his death, when she destroys the formula they need to bargain with the robots. Domin continually underestimates the people he thinks he has power over, whether Helena or the Robots. Being a man for him seems to mean (a) being powerful and (b) being stupid.

Alquist is telling the robots that only humans can create life; robots can't do it. This seems odd because—well, where are all the birds? The bees? The oak trees? Life here seems to mean only people, but of course there's lots of other life on earth. Has that all stopped reproducing, too? Humanity is defined by it's ability to reproduce sexually—and so it's as if all other living creatures on earth are just forgotten.

This is Helena the robot talking here. But for some reason, even though she's a robot, she can't understand math. You could even argue that her inability to understand math is what makes her female, and therefore human. R.U.R. again sometimes condemns sexism—and then sometimes it seems to think that, without sexism, humans can't be humans, and the race will perish.