Before discussing whether social criticism in fiction can be effective or not without emotional involvement one must consider, in order to avoid forthcoming ambiguities which might blur the significance of the topic, what social criticism, constructiveness and what emotional involvement is.
Regarding the first term, criticism has to do with emitting a precise judgment about something (an idea, an event, etc). As the word suggests, social criticism has to do with conveying a judgment about any element within the boundaries of society. Further on, as this judgment is aimed to interest the reader it will most probably, and so proves literature's history, be negative. However, that judgment, in the form of a series of propositions (backed by evidence) cannot come about directly and explicitly, otherwise it wouldn't be fiction, but essay writing what is in our hands. Thus, evidence for the criticism comes about in narrative facts but how are the judgment, the propositions worked out in fiction?.
I have found, in the process of analysis of the three books to be discussed here (Othello, Doll's House and The Lord of the Flies) and with my background information, three conventional ways though which this is achieved: firstly, by describing actions (like a group of boys piercing another one as if he were a pig) or by describing objects (includes people, like the painted hunters, and places, like the sober bourgeois house of the Helmer's) which may, by themselves, provoke rejection or at least negative prejudice in the reader's mind (that is a form of negative judgment); secondly, by "speaking- through characters when they give their own view of things, producing proper, coherent and deep statements (as if it were an essay) and making them match with facts presented in the book (as when Nora tells his husband, at the end of the third act of Doll's House, "You were kind with me but out home was nothing but a recreational place.
