Pepper's Reading Biography - our role models in fiction.

 

Fans of The Naughtiest Girl series unite! Fond memories come flooding back as I read both Wee Kiat and Kit’s entries about this Enid Blyton series about protagonist Elizabeth Allen and her forays/ mishaps/ adventures at Whyteleafe boarding school. I relished the books in those Primary school years; The Naughtiest Girl series gave me the only books I’ve ever read more than five times. It gave me role models – initially, I aspired to be Rita, the kind-hearted, fair, smart head girl of Whyteleafe. I aspired to go to Raffles Girls’ School because I imagined that Whyteleafe would have a uniform like theirs. So I was considerably disappointed when my PSLE T-score fell one mark short of getting me into said school and landed me in Nanyang Girls’ High – back in those days, we weren’t allowed to have hair longer than three cm below the ear or wear watches that had faces larger than a fifty-cent coin. But I digress

At about the same time as I was reading The Naughtiest Girl, I discovered another role model in fiction, this time in the form of Roald Dahl’s (and arguably, Quentin Blake’s) Matilda Wormwood.   Matilda was the first of the many Roald Dahl works that were to capture my imagination And I found myself immersed in the wacky, topsy-turvy worlds of chocolate factories, giant peaces, witches and friendly giants. I returned, time and again, to Matilda though, secretly wishing I could move a pen by staring at it long enough, and even-more-secretly wishing I was as brainy as her.

I then graduated to the likes of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven. Not long later I was introduced to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. But I must contend that as far as the genre of detective fiction goes, Dame Agatha Christie’s works take the cake. My first Agatha Christie whodunit was And Then There Were None, but I soon grew to love the shrewdly intelligent spinster detective Miss Marple – more so than I did Hercule Poirot, whom I’d always thought was a smart aleck too pompous, too smart for his own good.

At some point I decided to move on to what I thought then were chunkier, meatier works and so I picked up John Grisham and Jeffery Archer. I found yet another possible role model, this time in the protagonist of The Prodigal Daughter, Florentyna Kane. I will admit: I was an idealistic teenager who dreamt (too) big and after reading The Prodigal Daughter, made it my ambition to become, as Florentyna came close to being, the first woman president of my country. So much for that.

Reality checked in not too longer after, and by the time I reached Junior College, I’d accepted the fact that I was no Florentyna Kane or Matilda. I was plain, old, ordinary me who had to sit for my ‘A’ levels. For school, I studied Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and John Donne’s metaphysical poetry. In my own time, I picked up Virginia Woolf and found myself thoroughly mesmerized by her stream-of-consciousness style of writing. It was a stark, and very welcome, contrast to the prose of Dickens’ Hard Times. I remember Mrs Dalloway being the first time I’d encountered anything like stream-of-consciouness writing and I was enchanted.  With its broaching on issues on mental health, suicide, war and death I remember thinking it was the most honest piece of writing I’d encountered. There were a couple of lines that stood out especially for me; one of them was this:

“[Clarissa] had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

They say that in reading you discover that you’re not alone – that was precisely how I felt when I weaved in and out of the interior monologues of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. After finishing Mrs Dalloway, I picked up Woolf’s Night and Day, The Waves and A Room of One’s Own; I grew fascinated with Virginia Woolf and eventually, it was this fascination that propelled me to study English Literature in university.

If I had to choose a university again, I would still make the University of York my first choice. It was idyllic; it was a great place to just…dwell. There was just one bus that travelled to campus. Our campus was populated by bird life – ducks, geese, swans (and in summertime, little ducklings, geese-lings, swan-lings!) I had, in York, a room of my own that was too dark for any reading activity, so I’d make the common kitchen my reading room. I read furiously in university, both because I had to for my course, but also because for once, I didn’t have other subjects like Physics/ History/ Chemistry competing for my attention; I could devote all the time in the world to reading whatever I wanted. Oh, I miss university! I digress again.

So anyway, my BA course started off with the compulsory reading of Beowulf. It was a bewildering read – I couldn’t make head or tail of it upon first or second reading. Of the less bewildering reads, there was Henry James (whom I discovered I was quite fond of), Woolf (of course), JM Coetzee, Samuel Beckett (okay, maybe this was bewildering as well) etc. I decided by the end of my BA course that I wanted to focus on Modernist works in my MA, and so, on I went to pursue my MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature. It was during the MA program that I started paying more attention to literary critics than to the works themselves. On the reading list were names like Barthes, Foucault, Eagleton, Judith Butler, Brooks and more significantly (for me, at least), Martin Esslin and his writings on the Theatre of the Absurd. For my MA thesis, I eventually chose to discuss Beckett’s theatre in relation to Esslin’s writings and twentieth-century drama. Writing the thesis brought me to reading the works of Pinter, Ionesco, Stoppard, Camus and Albee.

Thesis readings aside, there was one memorable event during the MA course that would probably stick in my head for life – we had to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. And as any Literature student may find, reading Ulysses from cover to cover is not too unlike attempting to complete a full marathon. I was daunted. But had the privilege of meeting a tutor – Dr Vicki Mahaffey – who made us come together one night, and take turns to read through Ulysses. Yes, from cover to cover, with pizza breaks in-between. What an experience! My tutor insisted that we read it out aloud because that was Joyce’s intention. And so we read through the night and skipped lessons the next day. It was absolutely worth it as I have no confidence of being able to read Ulysses cover-to-cover on my own.

Looking back now at my reading biography, I can see how when growing up, I found my role models in the books I read. I don’t know if children now still read Matilda. Hrm, I’m not so tuned in with children’s/ young adult’s literature these days. My question is, if not The Naughtiest Girl and Matilda, where do children now find their role models? I’m thankful for parents who recognized the importance of reading.