December 3, 2004

Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Dystopias

By NANELLE R. BARASH and DAVID P. BARASH

At one point in the classic movie version of The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr asks: "What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got?" The answer, for Lahr's Cowardly Lion, is "courage." We ask, albeit less poetically: "What puts the dys in dystopia?" And we answer: a denial of biology.

Literary dystopias have this in common: They are imagined societies in which the deepest demands of human nature are either subverted, perverted, or simply

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