Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

The first important feature of Miss Rumphius that must be noted is the fact of the interpenetration and interdependence of narrative and illustration. Indeed the mechanism of colorful illustration reinforces and helps explain the themes of the narrative. This is a point to which the research will return. The second notable feature of Miss Rumphius is that its fundamental narrative strategy has to do with point of view and the manipulation of time. The story is told in the voice of its first-person-peripheral narrator, Alice, who is a child with a great aunt, also named Alice, who is Miss Rumphius. The actual line of action, however, focuses on Miss Rumphius's adventures. The first-person-peripheral Alice is a point of identification with readers, and the fact that Miss Rumphius is her great aunt reinforces that identification since readers are likely to have some experience with relatives outside their immediate family circle who may seem, for one reason or another, somewhat exotic. Of particular note, too, is the fact that Miss Rumphius pursues her objective of making the world a more beautiful place on the advice of her grandfather, removed as many generations from Miss Rumphius as

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important about these themes is that they have the effect of obliging Miss Rumphius to look outside herself to accomplish her objectives. This constitutes tacit encouragement to readers to do something of the same thing, more or less putting the author in the same relationship to the reader as Miss Rumphius is to her great-niece Alice. The whole effect is to suggest and then validate imaginative possibility in the experience of life. Miss Rumphius has the advantage of not being the parent of Alice from the point of view of undertaking world travel and the adventure of improving the world. It is conceivable that if Miss Rumphius were Alice's mother or even grandmother, an inquiring child might be anxious about where the children of Miss Rumphius are. The prim and proper spinster, however, does not threaten the child's expectation of family-unit stability as she sets about exploring the world at large on one hand, and on the other functions as an emblem of a generally self-sufficient life lived in a general environment of day-to-day freedom. Thus her visit to the conservatory or to the seashore, undertaken in highly proper Victorian dress, can be experienced as an adventure in discovery and affinity with the natural world instead
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1510
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)