Especially in the movies, the aspirations and class assumptions are not hidden.
If anything is going to put modern readers off the novel, it will be its class assumptions.
After this war is over, he declared, we must care for the less fortunate, discard old class assumptions, build "a land fit for heroes" as was promised, and then betrayed, after the first war.
Then, not long after publishing Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a kind of bildungsroman made of interlinked stories, she got divorced and found herself back in Ontario, where the sexual and social changes in the air did not always fit well with the religious and class assumptions of small-town Canada.
Before you can start huffing superiority, Poppy and her roommate, Zoe (Alexis Zegerman, tastily tart to Poppy's sugar), are joking about Stravinsky and "The Rite of Spring," a bit of high-cultural name-dropping that feels as if it had been specifically designed to tweak the audience's class assumptions.
The article is a good example of the hidden class assumptions that blinds many journalists who write for the nation's mainstream news outlets.
It's time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.
The characters' middle-class assumptions crumble as life is stripped down to a matter of mere survival: a college degree in design or music becomes an unimaginable luxury (Lowell's 17-year-old daughter turns instead to prostitution) and they look back with incredulity on a world where people had the leisure and means to indulge affectations.
Despite gilded-class assumptions raised by Ms. Ford's fashion pedigree and her mother's wealthy third husband, Anson Beard Jr., a former Morgan Stanley senior executive, Ms. Ford quickly points out that she grew up in Naples, Fla., playing paddleball as a teenager and perfecting her tan.
