Russell Uses Comedy to Explore the Clash of Class and Culture in Educating Rita. How Do You Respond to This View?

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Question: Russell uses comedy to explore the clash of class and culture in Educating Rita. How do you respond to this view? Class and culture play a huge role on any society, prehistoric and contemporary. Class refers to a system of divisions where people are judged on their social and economic status whilst culture refers to the ideas, customs and beliefs of a particular people or society. Willy Russell’s Educating Rita place a key importance on class and culture and the clash of the two, with the two characters of the play contrasting their supposed class and culture. Educating Rita was set in the 1980s, a time where Thatcherism had taken over Britain, grasping many industrialised areas of Britain, and therefore it could be argued that Russell was attempting to render the importance of education within this era. In this essay, I will be focusing on how class and culture clashes in Educating Rita with the two main characters, Frank and Rita. In the opening act, Rita’s cultural references are comically differentiated from Frank’s. An example of this would be when Frank asked Rita whether she knew a poet called Yeats, in which she replied “The wine lodge?” As Rita attempts to enter Frank’s office, the door is bolted closed, stuck, and this could act as an extended metaphor for the barrier to education between the two classes, with Rita fighting to gain the simple thing that Frank takes for granted, sitting carelessly with no worries. This could also be a comical attempt to show the contrast between the two cultures, depicting Frank to take education for granted whilst Rita, on the other hand, will not give up until she gets what she believes she deserves. After she walks in the office, she notices everything around her, unlike Frank who hasn’t looked at it “for the past ten years or so”, a painting in particular, which she describes as being “nice” and then

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