Social Problems in Fiction

Numerous works of fiction look to the future and find there some reflection of issues in the present. One of the ways of depicting the consequences of current problems is to project them into the future and to show how they affect a society intended to be utopian but that is in reality dystopian, and this technique can be seen in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale and in the films Metropolis (1926) and Soylent Green (1973). The social problems addressed in each film are different, but in each case the creator of the work shows that problem in stark relief by setting it in a supposedly utopian social setting.

The word "utopia" can have a specific meaning or a broader meaning. A utopia is a society that offers a perfect form of government, at least according to the individual who has developed it. The word is of Greek origin, a play on the Greek word eutopos, meaning "good place." Many writers have seemed convinced of the idea of and the inevitability of progress, and yet the reality has often seemed to belie this belief with periods of economic troubles, social unrest, and other ills. At various times, this has produced a reaction in the form of utopian literature suggesting how to correct the ills of society by reshaping it from top to bottom. Jean Pfaelzer writes of a spate of such writing at the end of the nineteenth century,

The popularity of this generation of utopian fiction lies partially in its incorporation of various explanations for the recurren

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rn of this regime is human reproduction; the time is the foreseeable future, when a devastating combination of chemical pollution, radiation, and epidemic venereal disease has caused the national birthrate to fall below replacement level (Kendall 1). Atwood reminds us all how fragile many of our ideas about the family, about women, and about our own role in society may be, based as they are on such uncontrollable factors as the birth rate. Both Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) and Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green (1973) also look to a dystopian future in which there is some form of totalitarian or near-totalitarian state to cope with the vast population and to keep society functioning no matter what the cost. In each case there is an exploited working class which is considered volatile and from which certain secrets are kept in order to continue the exploitation, maintain order, and assure the prerogatives of the ruling class without undue reaction from the working class. Any sense of a utopia in these films is strictly for the few, while the mass of humanity is pressed into smaller and smaller space in a society where population has increased too rapidly to assure services, housing, food, and other amenities to everyone, let a

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