UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA NACIONAL

FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES

DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS ESPAÑOL/LENGUAS

NAME OF THE COURSE: Anglophone Literature II

SUBMITTED BY: Sergio Andrés Padilla Guzmán

GROUP: 3

EDUCATING RITA

Discuss the character's coherence with their current studies of the

Humanities/literature, general education, milieu and goals for future life.

Dr. Frank is an unenthusiastic literature teacher who has lost his passion or

love if you would, related to academic duties. There is a discrepancy between

what he is supposed to be and what he actually is as an educator; because of

his dissatisfaction with life he ends up struggling with the sole purpose of a

person who provides instruction, quite the contrary, he does not care about his

students or his peers, he is a pedantic person who shows off his knowledge

and his achievements to the extent of considering them worthless. He

humiliates in a very subtle yet hurtful way all the people around him as

pictured in the scene when he asks his students “what are you doing in here?”,

it is very obvious that if it were up to every person they would rather choose to

make love with someone or going to a pub to drink it up than being in front of

an old-bitter man. On the other hand, he has this second wife or pseudo-lover

who looks up to him and who is being neglected in all ways, I suppose, by no

other, therefore her cheating on him is neither her fault nor her choice, but the

only thing left to do, in other words, Dr. Frank is to blame as well. Even

though he is a despicable joke of a teacher, throughout the film he is able to

reach one student: Rita or was it her that reached out to him? Anyhow, he does

one single teacher-like thing in the whole story; however, he is not sure if he is

doing the right thing for Rita by educating her, but that is exactly what Rita

longs for. In the end, he does what he does best which is leaving things to be

sorted out by themselves and he is sent to Australia, but there is no telling that

he will not make the same mistakes down under.

As for Rita, she wants to see the world through a different perspective and

mostly she wants to discover herself, so she enrolls the university in order to

fulfil her desires. Rita is a charming girl who is not afraid to speak her mind,

being this trait what caught Dr. Frank attention; in turn his irreverence

mesmerizes her innocent mind, which is why she refuses to have another

mentor. Rita slowly displays a breakthrough with her education, but in the

process she starts to feel out of place because she cannot relate to his past and

the people she used to talked to and at the same time she is not smart enough

to understand cultured people, in her words she is still “half-cast”, thus she

strives to achieve what she has always wanted being so the respect that comes

along education. So after summer school, Rita has become much more

independent and illustrated then Dr. Frank starts to feel jealous of her because

she does not need him anymore to assert herself. The fact that now Rita is

intellectually sufficient has made Dr. Frank to restrain her from interacting

socially with other people and their relationship shatters because Rita will not

allow him to hold her back as her ex-husband did. They argue over the value

of Rita’s new self and her accomplishments and she tells him that she has

what he has and this fact bugs him, but he replies by saying that she has found

a different song and nothing more, nevertheless, by the time of Dr. Frank’s

departure they make amends and come to the conclusion that the value that

education holds in today’s society is but a prejudice.

And last but not least, Denny the husband. He is the portrait of the working

class culture back in the day. His background is one of very traditional

customs that is why he does not support Rita in her attempt for personal

realization and gets in her way whenever she tries to keep improving in the

process to acquire an education, just because Denny thinks of a woman as a

life bearer, as her only social role. This does not mean that Denny has not

romantic feelings or not care about Rita, it is simply him being scared of

slowly losing her as his wife and failing to have control over her life too. But

when Denny finds out that Rita is keeping him from being a father by using

contraceptive methods, Rita is on the pill, so to speak, he corners her with the

ultimatum of either giving up on her studies or kissing her marital life

goodbye, which she chooses the first so he goes next for a less ambitious or

pretentious woman and more fitting to conventional wisdom. Finally, what is

most paradoxical is that Denny out of them three at the end of the movie is the

only one that truly seems happy.