Educating Rita: Act One, Scene Two Summary & Analysis

When the lights come on, Frank is in his office looking out the window. After approaching the bookcase several times but refraining from looking for scotch, he says, “Oh, sod it!” to himself and starts searching for a bottle behind the books. As he does so, he hears Rita outside the door—she is oiling the tricky handle. She then enters and starts walking through the room and inspecting things, telling Frank that she loves his office because there’s nothing “phoney about it.” She wants a space like this someday, she tells him. When she asks if he’s been drinking, Frank says that he hasn’t, and she asks, “Is that because of me? Because of what I said to y’ last week?” In response, he says, “What? You think where so many others have failed, you have reformed me!”

Rita looks out the window and speaks admiringly about the campus and its students, telling Frank about her own experience in school. She explains that when she was younger, she couldn’t focus on her studies because doing so would have been out of step with what everybody around her was doing. She says that everybody always said school was “useless an’ irrelevant,” instead paying attention to “things like music an’ clothes an getting’ pissed.” She admits that she acted like this, too, but eventually she paused to consider what she was doing. “One day, you just stop an’ own up to yourself,” she says. “Y’ say, ‘Is this it? Is this the absolute maximum that I can expect from this livin’ lark?’” She explains that when she asked herself this question, she knew she had to decide between “another change of dress or a change in [herself].” 

Rita explains that she’s not going to get a new dress until she passes her first exam, at which point she’ll get “a proper dress, the sort of dress you’d only see on a educated woman.” Changing the topic, Frank and Rita discuss an essay Rita wrote about Rubyfruit Jungle. Frank tells her that her work was really more of “an appreciation” of the book than it was a piece of “analytical criticism.” “But I don’t want to criticise Rubyfruit Jungle!” Rita says. “Because I think it’s brilliant!” In response, Frank explains that there’s a difference between “analytical criticism” and “being critical in a censorious way.” In this regard, he tries to get Rita to approach literary criticism as “being purely objective,” telling her that calling a book “brilliant” is subjective and thus doesn’t qualify as “analytical.”

In light of what he has just said about literary criticism, Frank asks Rita to write an analysis of E.M. Forster’s Howards End—an assignment that annoys Rita because she disliked the book, finding it difficult to care about its characters or themes. As Frank tries to convince her that she’ll have to learn how to write intelligently even about books she hates (if she wants to pass her exams), she interrupts him by asking if he’s married. Frank tells her that he’s not, explaining that he’s divorced because one day, his then-wife pointed out that he had spent fifteen years writing poetry about nothing but the beginning of their relationship. “Are you a poet?” Rita asks, and he says. “Was—an extremely minor one—and so, to give me something fresh to fire the muse, she left me.” Instead of writing new poems, though, Frank stopped writing altogether.

Rita asks if she can buy some of Frank’s poetry, but he tells her that his books are out of print, and that she wouldn’t like them because they depend upon literary allusion, rendering them difficult to understand. “So d’you live on your own now?” she asks. “No!” he replies. “I live with someone; an ex-student, she’s now a tutor here. She’s very caring, very tolerant, admires me enormously.” While telling Rita about his girlfriend, Julia, Frank reveals that he often “stops out” for several days at a time. “If you were mine an’ y’ stopped out for days, y’ wouldn’t get back in!” Rita declares, and Frank says, “Ah, but Rita, if I was yours would I even consider stopping out for days?” 

Rita asks if Frank even likes Julia, and he says, “I like her enormously. It’s myself that I’m not too fond of.” In response, she says, “But you’re great.” Nonetheless, he assures her that there’s “less to [him] than meets the eye.” Missing the point, Rita says, “See—you can say dead clever things like that. I wish I could just talk like that, it’s brilliant.”

At this point, Frank tries to direct Rita’s attention back to Howards End, but she refuses, telling him that sometimes talking freely is important. “That’s what they do wrong in schools,” she says. “They get y’ gin’ and then y’ all havin’ a great time talkin’ about somethin’ that’s dead interestin’ but the next thing is they wanna turn it into a lesson.” Going on, she tells him about a fieldtrip she took once as a young student. On this trip, she spotted a beautiful, exotic bird. Just when she was about to tell the teacher about it, a fellow-student shushed her, saying, “Keep y’ mouth shut or she’ll make us write a bleedin’ essay on it!” Hearing this story, Frank says, “Yes! It’s what we do, Rita; we pluck birds from the sky and nail them down to learn how they fly.”

“You’d think there was something wrong with education to hear you talk,” Rita says, and Frank suggests that “perhaps there is.” Rita then asks why Frank’s teaching her. “Because it’s what you wanted,” he says. “If it was up to me, what I’d like to do is take you by the hand and run out of this room for ever.” Rita takes this as a joke, saying, “Oh, be serious!”, but Frank pushes on, saying, “I am, Rita. I am! Right now there are a thousand things I’d rather do than teach—most of them with you, young woman.” He then laments that Rita didn’t walk into his office twenty years ago. “I know,” Rita says. “But it’s not twenty years ago, Frank. It’s now—you’re there an’ I’m here.” In response, Frank says, “Yes and you’re here for an education. Now come on! Forster.”