30th Anniversary Celebration: Lessons on Global Citizenship in Barbara Cooney’s 'Miss Rumphius'

“When I grow up, I, too, will go to faraway places, and when I am old, I, too, will live by the sea.”

“That is all very well, little Alice,” said her grandfather, “but there is a third thing you must do.”

“What is that?” asked Alice.

“You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”

~~~

In its 30^th anniversary year, Barbara Cooney’s 1982 children’s book, Miss Rumphius, continues to share a relevant message of social justice, environmentalism, transnationalism, feminism, and personal existential fulfillment. The book, which was awarded the National Book Award for Children’s Books, tells the story of Alice Rumphius who lives out three things her grandfather tells her she must do in life: travel, live by the sea, and make the world more beautiful.

Miss Rumphius succeeds with the first two in her young adult life; traveling to Egypt, tropical islands, Australia, the Alps, and living in a cottage by the ocean. During this time, she learns to be a global citizen as a pseudo-intellectual librarian, a camel-rider, a small time botanist, Alps climber, and friend of a maharaja. Yet the main conflict of the story revolves around how she will make the world more beautiful. After being bedridden in her older age with back pain in her seaside cottage, she becomes enchanted with the lupines that bloom outside her window in the spring, and she decides to plant lupine seeds around her town when she is well again. The flowers become both an act of renewal after her physical illness and the seasonal winter, and an act of civic engagement.

The story’s deceptive simplicity within the guise of a children’s book does not distract from its significance in advocating for a life of activism, transnationalism, environmentalism, and feminism. As a single woman, Miss Rumphius furthers a legacy of social awareness, engagement with the global community, environmental justice, women’s agency on a global scale, and empowerment that her grandfather had fulfilled before her. Her praxis in making the world more beautiful by planting lupines creates micro level change that inspires macro level ethics at the end of the book when she tells her young niece that she, too, must do something to make the world more beautiful in her life. The niece, our narrator, closes the story saying, “I do not know yet what that can be,” transforming Miss Rumphius’ activism into advocacy for future generations to continue to make the world more beautiful.