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Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

This research examines the children's story Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas and action emerging in the narrative and then to discuss the literary means by which the action is driven and the ideas are illustrated and articulated.

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 Miss Rumphius is from her great-niece Alice. The device of connecting multiple generations in the narrative positions the actual unfolding of events of the main story in previous generations, i.e., a version of long-ago-and-far-away. That device is practical inasmuch as it enables the period illustrations, which include Miss Rumphius's quaint mode of dress, to make narrative sense.

But the device can be said to do more than simply position the narrative in ti...

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Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:13, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683126.html