Educating Rita essay

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                             Educating Rita essay

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“I’ve been realizing for ages that I was you know slightly out of step, I’m twenty six, I should have had a baby by now, everyone expects it, I’m sure me husband thinks I’m sterile. He was moaning all the time you know come off the pills, lets have a baby. I told him I’d come off the pills, just to shut him up. But I’m still on it, see I don’t want to baby yet. See, I want to discover myself first, do you understand that?

Changes take place in every one through our lives everyday; In this essay I will be exploring the changes that have happened in Franks and Rita relationship in the play Educating Rita by Willy Russell. I will be mainly focusing upon the attitudes of the two main characters towards each other and towards themselves.

Rita is a mature woman seeking an education, as she didn’t take the opportunity to learn when she was an amateur student because of the environment she lived around in and the fact she didn’t want to learn because of her popularity and her working class culture.

Frank: Rita why didn’t you become what you call a proper student? Rita: you know, boring, ripped-up books, broken glass everywhere, knives and fights and that was just in the staffroom. Nah, they tried their best I suppose, but studying was just for the whimps, wasn’t it? See, if I’d started taking school seriously I would have had to become different from me mates and that’s not allowed.

In reflected, Rita has come to realise how the law expectations surrounding her and her working class culture held her back from her real potential. She wants to change now and break this cycle. Frank, the other main character, is a teacher at the university where she has applied to do her course. He is around his 50’s and is Rita’s tutor. He is a lazy man, bored and frustrated by his life he too does not feel like he belongs anywhere. Frank does not like his job very much; he does not have any respect for himself at all. FRANK: my dear I actually an appalling teacher, most of the time, you see, you see it most of the time, you see it doesn’t matter appalling teaching is quite in order for most of the appalling students. And the others manage to get by despite me. They expect us to teach when the pubs are open. The relation ship between frank and Rita at the beginning of the play is not strong, frank doesn’t really want to tutor Rita because he knows she is an uneducated woman and it will be hard work for him to educate her. However he is attracted to her personality and her free spirit. She is like a breath of freash air and though he doesn’t seem to want to change, I think he does. As we read the play we see how they change each other. This can be symbolised by the fact that at the beginning of the play rita tells him to fix his door. This could represent how she is going to fix him

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When Rita was younger she did not achieve a full education so she feels that her life is empty, she wants to find her inner self before she can move on with her life RITA: I don’t want to have a baby yet, I wants to find myself first, how can I look after someone else when I don’t know who I am?

Nobody understands her; she has no support from Denny (her boy friend) or her dad. Everyone around her is educated so it makes it harder to learn however on the other ...

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