In practice, a society will always have an underclass. May it be convicts, slaves, or a discriminated social group; an underclass can clearly be identified. Contemporary examples would include the racially and sexually discriminated, and the homeless. The society in Thomas More's Utopia is, through the perspective of Thomas More a portrayal of a perfect community under a perfect social system, at the time More wrote his novel. That society however, is not flawless because it does not eliminate its very own underclass- their slaves. This is appropriated in Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale through the portrayal of a Dystopia with a social hierarchy that exploits women and those who did not comply with totalitarian laws-the people sent to the colonies. The selected text, a film by Andrew Niccol's Gattaca appropriates the underclass within a society that discriminates people by their DNA. The three different societies all have those who benefit from the underclass- their social elites. It shows that the two complementary classes, the underclass and the social elites, are required for the society to function, but reflect that social equality is practically impossible and that there will always be a class exploited by the rest of its society.
Utopia was intended to be a classless society, but the exploitation of slaves by the Utopian citizens created an underclass to this imaginary perfect state. The novel was written by Sir Thomas More in early 16th Century England, where human rights were non-existent in the eyes of the authority. More's informative character, Raphael, is the narrator in Book Two but also an instrument to describe More's historical context Kthe slightest disobedience is punishable by deaththere's no distinction in law between theft and murder. It suggests from this historical context, More believed slavery would be a positive aspect of society, as an alternative to the death penalty.
