Educating Rita Essay

Moving into the world deals with aspects of growing up or transition into new phases of life and expanding the individual’s horizon. Through this change, individuals are faced with a range of consequences. The play Educating Rita by Willy Russell and Ian Mudie’s poem My father began as a god demonstrates that moving into the world could be from the character’s choices, transitions, social class which are shown through symbolism, metaphors and dialogue.
Rita has been faced with many consequences with her fixated desire to seek new experiences; this is firstly shown through her name change from Susan to Rita, indicating the aspiration to change herself to a standard she feels satisfied with. In the poem, the persona as a child idolises his father as god, but as he ages into a new phase of his life, his image of his father as a godlike figure slowly crumbled, and his own ego challenges his father’s view in a typical adolescent behaviour. Soon enough, in adulthood, he began to understand his father’s virtues and glorifies him back to a metaphoric god status.
As Rita continued into the world of education, there was friction in her marriage with her husband; Denny about her ongoing studies. Despite that Rita is expected to settling down and having a baby, she chooses to seek an education in the Open University, Denny wonders “where the girl he married has gone to”. Another occasion where Denny cannot figure out what Rita is planning is when she talks to him about having ‘choice’ in the course her life will take, “he thinks we’ve got choice because we can go to the pub that sells eight different lager”. Along the way of Rita’s studies, the friction between their relationship escalates, at first Denny makes studying a problem for Rita, being unpleasant if she tries to write essays at home, forcing her to do her work at the hairdressing shop. “Denny gets dead narked if I work at home. He doesn’t like me doing this.” “Denny found out I was on the pill again; it was my