Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [162]
Education as represented by the film seems to be of two kinds: enabling and stultifying. The next step in the development of the thesis would be to elaborate on how the film seeks to distinguish enabling forms of education from debilitating ones (as represented by the self-satisfied and status-conscious behavior of the supposedly educated people at Frank’s university). Perhaps this difference is what the film is primarily interested in—not just education’s potential to liberate.
Revised thesis: Educating Rita celebrates the liberating potential of enabling—in contrast to stultifying—education.
Step 6: Repeat steps 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Having refined the thesis in this way, the writer would then repeat the step of seeing what the new wording allows him or her to account for in the evidence. The revised thesis would foreground a contest in the film between two different kinds of and attitudes toward education. This thesis as lens would cause us to see Frank’s problems as being less a product of his education than of the cynical and pretentious versions of education that surround him in his university life. It would also explain the film’s emphasis on Frank’s recovery of at least some of his idealism about education, for which Rita has provided the inspiration.
What else does this revised thesis account for in the evidence? What about Frank’s emigration to Australia? If we can take Australia to stand for a newer world, one where education would be less likely to become the stale and exclusive property of a self-satisfied elite, then the refined version of the thesis would seem to be working well. In fact, given the possible thematic connection between Rita’s working-class identity and Australia (associated, as a former frontier and English penal colony, with lower-class vitality as opposed to the complacency bred of class privilege), the thesis about the film’s celebration of the contrast between enabling and stultifying forms of education could be sharpened further. It might be proposed, for example, that the film presents institutional education as desperately in need of frequent doses of “real life” (as represented by Rita and Australia)—infusions of working-class pragmatism, energy, and optimism—if it is to remain healthy and open, as opposed to becoming the oppressive property of a privileged social class. This is to say that the film arguably exploits stereotypical assumptions about social class.
Revised thesis: Educating Rita celebrates the liberating potential of enabling education, defined as that which remains open to healthy doses of working-class, real-world infusions.
Repeat steps 3 and 4, locating evidence not adequately accounted for and ask so what?
At the end of the film, Frank and Rita walk off in opposite directions down long, empty airport corridors. Though promising to remain friends, the two do not become a couple. This closing emphasis on Frank’s and Rita’s alienation from their respective cultures, and the film’s apparent insistence on the necessity of each going on alone, significantly qualifies the happiness of the “happy ending.”
Having complicated the interpretation of the ending, the writer would again need to modify the thesis in accord with new observations. Does the film simply celebrate education if it also presents it as being, to some degree, incompatible with conventional forms of happiness? By emphasizing the necessity of having Frank and Rita each go on alone, the film may be suggesting that to be truly liberating, education—as opposed to its less honest and more comfortable substitutes—inevitably produces and even requires a certain amount of loneliness and alienation. Shown in Figure 11.4 are the successive revisions of the thesis.
Repeat step 5, reshaping the claim.
Final version of thesis: Educating Rita