Throughout this play, I was struck mostly by Helena Glory's character. When I first saw her name, I thought two things: (1) This girl is R.U.R.'s Helen of Troy. (2) Her last name is glory, that definitely means something important.
To speak to the first reaction--in simple terms, Helena plays a beautiful woman on the side of the robots who is then taken (in some sense of the word) by Harry Domin. Years later, the revolt of the robot begins. Though Helena's 'kidnapping' does not necessarily cause the revolt, she does switch sides from supporting liberation of the robots to having rather blasé opinions about their actions but casually wishing they might have souls. Maybe she would have prevented the revolt if she had never joined the side of the robot-makers. So, this storyline actually does somewhat mirror the story of Helen of Troy, but I'm unsure if it is only a coincidence. Whether or not Helena represents Helen of Troy, I really just do not like her.
She entered Domin's factory with a plan, and dropped it within seconds when he asked her to marry him. Though she was resistant to his request, she came around almost immediately. The play then jumps abruptly to ten years later--so I cannot imagine she opposed his desires at any point thereafter.
Later when she secretly burned the directions of how to build a robot, I thought she was finally taking a stand, or attempting to display some act of courage or heroism. Only pages later, however, she crumbles when asked why she burned the directions, and questions her behavior incoherently. Her performance was so pathetic that I wonder if I actually missed some underlying clue where Helena is actually the secret hero. I would appreciate anyone's feedback on that one...
And to speak to my second reaction--though I mostly already described my sentiment for Helena, this stems back to her last name. Of course, Helena is glorified by all the men in the play (p.s. why?!), but she never physically does anything worthy of glory. She does not live up to her name, which perhaps suggests that glory under a falsified God is impossible. I am interested to see if everyone else detested Helena as much as I did.
I'm right there with you Lindsay. Helena Glory is terrible, but maybe that's how she was designed? I find it hard to believe that Karel Capek didn't have some motive for making her as pathetic as he did. I think in some ways Helena represents something tragic about mankind. Shes inconsistent, irrational, and manic which are all tragic qualities most people possess in some respect. The juxtaposition between Helena and the rational, pragmatic robots exemplifies the desire for man to create and improve. A stronger and more rational being like the robot would be much superior to the human form. It is exactly this reason that Domin and the other scientists, with the expection of Dr. Gall, didn't want the robots to have a "soul" or free-will. The only thing I don't understand is why Helena burnt the secret of robot creation. Did it symbolize mankind's last epic fall before our extinction or was it symbolic passing of the torch to the next ideal being? I think the latter most accurately describes the last crazy thing Helena did. Burning the secret to manufacture robots necessitated robot procreation in place of reproduction. This procreation, which is suggested and strongly implied to emerge out of the love between Pimus and robot Helena, is the trademark of the continuation of life.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if it's definitive to say that Helen's course of actions was any less heroic than any other characters in the play. To illustrate my point, allow me to make a reference to The Lawrence Kohlberg's test. This is a psychological test that place a person's moral reasoning has six stages of development (more on this test can be found on wikipedia). The six stages sound nice and dandy until several found out that should a girl take this test, her score would almost always end up at the third level at the highest, whereas a boy of the same age would score at least a level higher. This problem is emphasized even more by the American feminist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, who suggests that this test leaves out Virtue Ethics in its entirety, i.e evaluating ethics based upon one's own ideals and characters. In other words, girls and boys do not play by the same type of reasoning. While a man may have a tendency to employ the "science of deductions" as his primary reasoning tactics, a woman, presumably influenced by the innate protective nature of a mother figure, may tend to resolve issues in such a way that everybody's a winner at the end (imagine a mother with two kids and one remaining cookie). Does this innate protective nature make Helen a pathetic character? Not exactly. Tragic, yes, because she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. But to think of her as being an incompetent decision maker is to, in a sense, dumb down women entirely. The fact that she is also more concerned with procreation ties nicely with this notion as well. And perhaps this is also why the remaining characters, arguably all-male to make a stereotypical emphasis, find her appearance as refreshing and captivating.
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