RUR Gender Quotes

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.