Pleasantville Characters

Going through transitions can be challenging, but they can have their rewards when the transition is completed. Many social, economic, gender, educational, race and religious classes divide people in today’s society and it can hold many people back from transitioning into a better standard of living. In Willy Russel’s play Educating Rita and Gary Ross’s film Pleasantville these themes and challenges are explored extensively through the characters of Rita and Betty respectively.

Transitioning into a world that satisfies what said individual desires can be very challenging.

In Educating Rita, the character Rita finds herself struggling with her mundane existence as a hairdresser and yearns to enter fully and with confidence into her tutor Frank’s academic, middle-class world. Despite her being very keen on transitioning into a more cultured and educated world, Rita encounters significant barriers and obstacles through her husband Denny and her own feelings of inferiority with the cultured and educated world she wants to be a part of.

The quote “When I came back he’s burnt all me books an’ papers most of them” represents Denny’s resentment of Rita and the transition she is trying to go through. It also represents the significant obstacle she faces in reconciling with the old world and the life she believes will be more rewarding than the life she currently lives in the working class world.