Frank is acting as though he is an incapable teacher/tutor, this is shown by him having many bottles of whiskey hidden behind books on his shelf, not being responsible about his job (he strolls into a class late, drunk and during the lecture he quotes Rita’s alternate meaning of assonance as “getting the rhyme wrong.”)
Rita on the other hand is wishing she hadn’t missed out on education when she was in school; this was because she didn’t pay attention as it was the cool thing to do. But by the start of the play, when she is older, she has realised that she had done the wrong thing and has applied at the Open University for an English degree.
There was also a big impediment which stopped Rita from her studying was her husband, Denny. All he wanted was for him and Rita to settle down and start a family. This was the traditional thing to do he thought, not run about trying to get an education. In act 1, Rita says two things about Denny, the first: “He hates me comin’ here. It’s like drug addicts, isn’t it? They hate it when one of them tries to break away.” And the second is: “He said there’s a time for an education. An’ it’s not when y’ twenty six an’ married.” But Rita was set not to listen to him and decided to not to go with the flow but to keep on the pill and not have a baby until she had what she wanted. Denny finds this out goes livid, he takes action, burning all the books that Frank lent Rita to help her with her studies.
“‘I read this poem about fightin’ death…’ ‘Ah - Dylan Thomas…’ ‘No. Roger McGough.’”. Rita is talking about a popular novel which was sold to the masses as an easy read to fill up people’s time, whereas Frank was talking about the welsh poet who wrote famous poems such as ‘Under Milk Wood’ and ‘Villanelle’.
Also Rita doesn’t know any popular literature authors or poets at the start of the play, for example, “‘Do you know Yeats?’ ‘The wine lodge?’ ‘No the poet.’” This once again is thinking of another lower class approach to the name “Yeats” as “Yates” the pub chain.
In the first scene of the first act, they have the conversation about Frank’s picture: “‘That’s a nice picture, isn’t it?’ ‘Erm – yes, I suppose it is – nice…’ ‘It’s very erotic.’ ‘Actually I don’t think I’ve looked at it for about ten years but yes I suppose it is.’
This shows the differences in how the two classes tackle different types of the
Arts, such as literature, poetry and art. The lower class person, whose life can get rather hectic, and sometimes they just need something they can sit down and just sink into, reads popular fiction or ‘pulp fiction’ usually written by popular authors of the time such as E. E. Smith and Giles A. Lutz, a thing which they don ‘t have to understand they can just read. Unlike Frank, a middle class man, who studies and understands literature, poetry and art, this is because he understands it and can look at the deeper meaning within the piece of work because he sees the subtler points and adds them to the overall picture’s meaning to him.
Another difference between the classes is how Frank and Rita regard what a night out is, for instance, Frank invites Rita to a dinner party, which is what would be an average night out for a middle class man such as him but Rita panics because despite her cool and confident outer shell, she is actually worried about it because she feels insecure about taking the step from her class to a new one as she thinks she wouldn’t know what wear, say, take, etc.
So in conclusion, it was not Rita’s intelligence which was holding her back it was that she was stuck between two completely different classes, the lower one composed of clubbing, drugs and doing what everyone else does while the other is completely the opposite made up of dinner parties, brandy and literature.
