Rita and Frank's Relationship in Educating Rita

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Rita and Frank's Relationship in Educating Rita

At the start of the play, Rita and Frank's personalities clash because

Rita is an uneducated girl who has the attitude of the working class.

Rita wants to improve herself and her life style. She wants to be in a

position where she has choices, the choice to change her life or to

stay the way she is, Rita calls it "finding herself." However, Frank

on the other hand is a man who has found teaching boring and

uninspiring, he has become disillusioned with his life, Rita is like a

breath of fresh air thrown into his drab, dreary and very bland life.

Rita and Frank have completely different views on life and the ways of

speaking about things. Even their accents are different. They each use

language in a completely different way, Frank will decorate his

sentences with long words, which Rita finds hard to understand, but is

fascinated by it.

Frank seems to find life boring and treats it as if he has done it all

before. Frank has a serious drink problem he uses this to drown out

his mundane life. He is unable to cope with his life and is incapable

of changing it, so he uses alcohol as an emotional crutch to give

support and hide behind.

Frank and Rita are two prime examples of 'the grass is greener on the

other side', each one is on the side that the other wants to be on,

and they are using each other to get to where they want to go.

When Rita first walks in to the office, Frank says, "and you are?"

Rita misunderstands him and replies, "I'm a what?" in response to this

question thinking that Frank was suggesting she was a thing. This

shows Rita's naivety in the use of the English la...

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cracking jokes and not talking seriously. This shows Rita has grown in

confidence and no longer needs humour to cover her inhibitions. She

has become a self-assured and confident person Frank is now relaxed

and can talk to Rita comfortably. Frank seems changed in the way he

talks. In asking Rita to come with him to Australia he is showing that

after all of the rows he still likes Rita's company and he doesn't

want to lose that company. It also shows he has lost some of his

inhibitions.

This play is all about two different people who start off with a

teacher student relationship, and don't get on much, then their

relationship evolves, and they start to complement each other and

become the best of friends and then go their separate ways: each a

different but better, more complete person, for meeting each other.

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