Before Frank has even met Rita, he seems to look down on her:
Frank: I’ve got this Open University woman coming, haven’t I…I shall need to go to the pub afterwards, I shall need to wash away the memory of some silly woman’s attempts to get into the mind of Henry James…
He talks as if Rita is below him, and incapable of studying and understanding the same things that he and his ordinary university students study and understand. He is prejudiced against Rita before he’s even met her; therefore when he does meet her, he’s surprised. She is not at all the stereotype working class girl that he expected. She seems to be in awe of Frank – this is the kind of person that she wants to be. She gets nervous and starts grilling him while he’s meant to be interviewing her:
Rita: I was just testing you.
Frank: Yes, you’re doing rather a lot of that, aren’t you?
Rita: That’s what I do. Y’know, when I’m nervous.
As Rita stands in front of Frank babbling away, I think that is when Frank starts to subconsciously like her. This sweet, funny, uneducated, working-class girl is who he sees and likes, whether Rita likes herself as she is or not. She is open, honest and completely unpretentious, which is what Frank is attracted to, probably because it is so rare that he meets people like that.
Frank: I think you’re marvellous. Do you know, I think you’re the first breath of air that’s been in this room for years.
When Frank says that he doesn’t want to teach Rita, she first becomes upset and then indignant:
Rita: Because you’re a crazy mad piss artist who wants to throw his students through the window, and I like you.
She is adamant that Frank will be her tutor, and in the end she gets her own way. It is then clear that, although Frank is the tutor and Rita the pupil, Rita has basic control over the relationship between them. They are constantly throwing light-hearted verbal abuse at each other and quickly become good friends. Frank also becomes Rita’s role model. She shows interest in Frank by asking intimate and quite nosy questions about his personal life:
Rita: Are you married? What’s your wife like? Why did you split up?
He shows interest in her by openly flirting with her:
Frank: What I’d actually like to do is take you by the hand and run out of this room forever.
Right now there’s a thousand things I’d rather do than teach; most of them with you, young lady…
As they get further into the course and Rita’s relationship with her husband Denny begins to deteriorate, it starts to become clear that whatever non-teacher-pupil feelings Frank may feel for Rita are unrequited. As Rita says herself, for the time being she is only interested in finding out about herself – she doesn’t have time to ‘rush off with some feller’. It is easy to see from the exchange between Frank and Rita on page 34 that while Frank sees Rita as someone he would like to know socially, someone to ‘go to the pub and drink pots of Guinness’ with, Rita only sees him as her tutor, someone that can help her make the step out of her world into a better one. Frank is concerned about Rita’s fall-out with Denny and wants to skip the lesson so they can talk about it; basically, he wants to be her shoulder to cry on. However, falling out with Denny only makes Rita more determined to complete the course. The sooner she gets educated, the sooner she can make her way up in the world.
Rita is still dependent on Frank though. When she goes to see her first professional play at the theatre, it is to Frank she runs to tell. This makes Frank feel proud:
Rita: I just had to tell someone who’d understand.
Frank: I’m honoured that you chose me.
She also still looks up to him as her role model. When she doesn’t turn up for dinner at Frank and Julia’s, it’s because she is worried that she’s not yet good enough to fit in with the kind of people Frank associates with. She is paranoid about her image – what dress she should wear, what wine she should take, what she should talk about. She wants to give off the impression that she is one of them – an educated woman that was brought up in the same culture as Frank and Julia and their friends. Frank however wanted Rita just to be herself – funny, delightful and charming. In a way, they have swapped the way they think. Frank at first looked down on Rita as a ‘silly Open University woman’ that didn’t have a chance getting educated, while she was open-minded and optimistic about catching up on her education. As Frank and Rita get to know each other and he realises that she is capable of learning the same things that he has studied, he becomes more open-minded and so doesn’t care about what Rita wears and what she talks about, but she becomes more narrow-minded and critical of herself as she tries to fit in with Frank’s upper-class friends.
As Rita becomes more and more independent, Frank becomes more and more emotionally attached to her. He is greatly upset when he finds out she didn’t tell him about her change of job, and he gets jealous when she comes back from summer school having learnt things that he didn’t teach her. He eventually convinces himself that Rita can’t bear to be around him any more:
Frank: You can hardly bear to spend a moment here can you?
Frank is angry and upset when he realises that he is no longer Rita’s only influence. She is educated and worldly now; she’s not ‘his’ Rita any more. He thinks that in her eyes he has reverted to being simply her tutor. But in the end, deep down they are still friends. Frank gave Rita what she went to him for – the freedom to be able to make choices.
1, 287 words
Graded A
