This is a film about education as self-transformation, Susan, a working-class girl, becomes Rita (she takes the name from Rita Mae Brown, author of the book Rubyfruit Jungle, which I discuss in chapter 3), through a process of being educated in literature. The narrative dramatizes how becoming civil is not simply about learning to read the right books or learning to appreciate the right objects but is about developing a different relationship to those objects. So in the first instance Rita learns by su>itchinga ^ecrions, by learning to appreciate some things, or to appreciate the difference between pulp fiction and literature. But by the end she becomes free from any such affection. She says, “You think you did nothing for me. You think I ended up with a whole lot of quotes and empty phrases. Well, all right. I did. But that wasn't your doing,I was too hungry for it all. I didn't question anything. I wanted it all too much so I wouldn't let it be questioned. Told you I was stupid," Her hunger for knowledge about x becomes symptomatic of her failure to transcend the working-class habitus that makes becoming educated desirable in the first place.
For Rita to become educated requires that she become free from hunger for things, from insistence on and in enjoyment. Having become free, Rita can now choose, with the capacity for choice being organized through tropes of indifference; “I might go to France. I might go to London. I might just stay here and carry on with my studies. I might even stay here and have a baby, I don't know. I will make a decision. I will choose.” Becoming civil converts the language of “must” to the language of “might” and eventually to the language of will and choice. We end up with a fantasy of a moral and middle-class subject as the one who is without habit, who will and can choose insofar as they are imagined as free from inclination.
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