frankenstein is the most elitist novel that I have ever read.

In literary criticism classes, we used books with various novels in them that the back half was filled with how various types of critics viewed the story. No one agreed on anything. This is because academics have to publish or die, so the they look for the latest buzzword that has a nebulous definition (this is why post modern means something different everytime I hear it used... by the way, all it originally meant--though like any great thought everything does tend to fit within various paradigm--was that there is no longer a god around to give us all a set of meanings that we believe in. The moderns were about discovering new universal truths that could be applied to everyone; post modernism says that no one beleives that anything necessarily means the same thing. Again, this is why there were so many damn critical interpretations I had to learn in that literary criticism class, which was taught by one of the greatest minds I have ever kneeled before, Dr. Deville
(a dedicated teacher who taught up until two weeks before his imminent death, which he experienced a week into his retirement).

Dross is the word I zoned in on in Frankenstein. Specifically, where she describes the little girl that the frankenstein's adopt after finding her in a village living among what the fucking elitist shelley calls, 'the human dross."

By this Shelley meant that only the elite in society were 'really human.' Dross is waste, by the way. Her interpretation of the book, you may not know, is about how if you educate the lower classes, they will be monsters, with no place in their working world, and too ugly to be accepted by the upper, educated classes (in the book, the monster becomes educated and eloquent. The only way you will ever see the truth is if I make the film, I fear.... and that isn't going to happen anytime soon, though you never know what I will do--ask M., she
knows).

Knowing all this was the Marxist interpretation, I was quite amused to know my brother in law had changed his name to Llama Dross. He did this for reason I won't go into in here without his okay, but whatever his reason, this is one fucking funny, thoughtfully chosen name.

So, next time someone brings up frankenstein, you can say that it was a modernist story, because the rich were trying to impose their will on everyone, to the degree of stopping them from becoming literate (and if you think that is meaningless, you should read the 'Autobiography of Frederick Douglas,' who describes a slave mind becoming literate and open).