The Story of Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic
by Michael Sims
Walker, 320 pp., $25
Charlotte’s Web is a beautiful story about a farm animal who pleads for his life and is mercifully spared. Since its publication in 1952, the book has inspired generations of children to wonder about the meat set on their plates, and generations of parents to search for comforting explanations, usually followed by a little dose of “realism” about farm animals and their fate: It’s just a story, a sentimental fantasy; nobody wants to harm the animals, but we have to eat, and anyway real pigs don’t cry out, like Wilbur in Charlotte, “Save me, somebody! Save me!” The concern is that impressionable children might read too much into it, by jumping to the conclusion that a tale of compassion for animals was actually meant to encourage compassion for animals.
The best children’s books have a realism of their own, showing cruel things as they are without recourse to the excuses and euphemisms one learns only later in life. Spend some time reading hunting literature, with its tortured rationales and raptures on the thrill of blood sport, and Bambi will seem like the voice of pure reason. A pig’s desire to live in Charlotte’s Web trumps the adult appetite for crispy bacon or pork chops; these trivial benefits of slaughter come off seeming low and selfish, and in the moral purity of the story there is no way to make them appear otherwise. There’s a reason that hunters, livestock farmers, and butchers so often serve as the villains in children’s literature. It’s because the ruthless things they do rely on justifications too labored for a kid to have mastered yet—only more so in our day, when the details of animal farming are so bad as to require concealment even from adults. For cheap sentimentality, there is no outdoing the folks who today run farms that resemble concentration camps and then give the meat brand names like “Sunnyland” and “Happy Valley.” They least of all are in a position to fault others for trading
in fantasies.
Charlotte’s Web appeared before real-life barnyards gave way to “mass-confinement facilities” and pigs became “production units” hidden away in factory farms beyond the reach of human charity, much less the solicitude of a spider. But it’s a safe bet the author would not have approved, and indeed it turns out that E. B. White had doubts about the necessity of slaughter even in more lenient settings, as Michael Sims explains in his excellent study of the classic tale and how it came to be written. White was himself a part-time farmer, and produced the bestselling paperback children’s book ever (some 45 million copies) after tending each morning to the inhabitants of a barn in coastal Maine that is today on the National Register of Historic Places. By the late 1940s, writes Sims, White—known to friends as Andy—began to feel “guilty.”
One issue that haunted Andy was the morality of raising farm animals. As he walked along through the early-morning mist, around the corner of the barn and down to the barn cellar, carrying a sloshing pail of slops for a pig, he faced again and again what he thought of as his own duplicity. His pig relied on him to deliver food and guard the door, and Andy performed these tasks conscientiously. But in a few months he was scheduled to betray the creature’s confidence and slaughter it. . . . He would sit up late in April, tenderly nursing a lamb back to health, only to slaughter it come August. So much gentleness to end in so much blood, in a hammer blow to the head, a knife slash to the throat—only hours after Andy had dutifully served what the lamb did not know was its last meal.
If E. B. White had become a vegetarian, we would surely know it. Yet for a time, at least, his thoughts wandered in that direction, understandably for a man who all his life had admired and empathized with animals. As a boy in Mount Vernon, New York, White enjoyed the company of chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese raised by the family in a stable out back, along with the dogs, cats, canaries, frogs, and other creatures always nearby. He was drawn to books of the era like Lives of the Hunted that viewed animals individually and with “sympathetic curiosity,” as Sims puts it, instead of just as prey, resources, or indistinguishable specimens of a group. Animals, White realized early on, were “not merely background characters in his own little drama.” They were “just as real as human beings, as alive as himself,” and in the way of many children he felt a special bond with animals that never wore off.
About half of The Story of Charlotte’s Web takes us through White’s early life, an association with the New Yorker that lasted until his death in 1985, his marriage to colleague Katherine Angell, and their move from Manhattan to Maine as soon as literary acclaim provided the means. He wrote, of course, on all kinds of subjects, and even with the success of his collected essays and two children’s stories—the Stuart Little adventures, about a mouse in New York City, came out in 1945—is perhaps best known for expanding the English-usage rules of his Cornell professor William Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1918) to give us, in 1959, “Strunk & White.” It’s all briskly told, with a view to the life that led to Charlotte’s Web. In Sims’s own pleasant style, free of the strained academic theorizing one fears in books about books, he tells us how a good man produced an unlikely work of greatness about a clever spider weaving her web to proclaim the innocence of a pig named Wilbur. And when he comes to the work itself, examining White’s notebooks and evolving drafts of Charlotte’s Web in the early 1950s, what’s clear are the perfect instincts of the writer in his prime.
“My fears about writing for children are great,” White had told his editor. “One can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness.” To avoid this, he filled the story with as much natural detail as it would bear, about how spiders really act, pigs really live, and small farms really operate: “What he did not want to do,” writes Sims, “was retell animal life in human terms.”
He had sketched out, for instance, an exchange with Charlotte in which Wilbur expounds on a general philosophy of life, as a creature needing only slop, straw, and company to be content. White dropped the scene, realizing (explains Sims) that “it would have been too self-aware for his innocent protagonist.” Another discarded passage had the pig save Charlotte from harm; White “decided instead to keep Wilbur passive and not heroic.” Likewise, though the animal characters speak, it is only the daughter of farmer John Arable who can hear them, because “Fern has empathy for other creatures . . . her innocent willingness to sit still and listen affords her a glimpse of other lives.”
Though White would surely have agreed that some animals can feel a measure of empathy themselves—along with varying capacities for loyalty, affection, altruism, and sorrow—he was careful, says Sims, not to “twist their personalities into moral versus immoral decisions.” So it is left to Fern to declare the planned execution of Wilbur an “injustice,” while Charlotte, soon to die herself, takes pity on the frightened piglet in more creaturely terms, wishing him more days to enjoy the gentle breezes, the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the world, “the glory of everything.” Wilbur is content in terms a pig might choose if he could, “comfortable and happy, for he loved life and loved to be a part of the world on a summer evening.”
It’s the words given to animal characters, of course, that invite lectures on “personification” from pedants, and here again we need only compare the fairy tale farmyard of Charlotte’s Web with the language of real-life hog farming today to test their essential truthfulness. Wilbur, upon learning what farmer Arable has planned for him, says “Stop! I don’t want to die! Save me, somebody!” A noted apologist for factory farming insists it’s not cruel to confine pigs in small cages for their entire existence because “these animals have never been in natural settings and so cannot know what they are missing.” Which of these accounts of how pigs feel is more disconnected from reality? Wilbur, at least, inhabits a recognizable universe in which living creatures seek comfort, dread death, and cry out in fear. The words “I don’t want to die” are anthropomorphic, but surely capture something of the sounds that fill slaughterhouses everywhere. By contrast, to conceive of millions of pigs living in misery but unaware of “what they are missing,” creatures who suffer but don’t even know it, is pure make-believe.
Only human pride could convince itself of such a thing, sacrificing honor in the care of animals and calling it rationality, subordinating compassion to a frivolous culinary preference and calling that maturity. Perhaps it was with this trait in mind that White came up with his most inspired touch in the story, when Charlotte, searching for just the right word to weave in Wilbur’s defense against the ax, settles on “HUMBLE.” The theme, writes Sims, is “the joy of being alive,” the happiness intended for all creatures, the august and lowly alike, and a fear of violent death no more complicated for a terrified human being than for any condemned animal. It is good to be spared, and good to be the one who does the sparing.
Along the way we learn how White came up with the names for Wilbur (after a pig he’d raised), “Charlotte A. Cavatica” (a play on the spider’s genus and species names), and other characters, although Sims may have missed one in the case of the family name “Arable.” It not only conveys suitability for farming, but is awfully close to “Arabella,” the earthy wife in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure who aids in the slaying of a pig: “The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes rivetting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.”
This conjecture would square with the sense of regret that Sims tells us helped inspire Charlotte. White himself described the feeling in a 1948 Atlantic Monthly essay entitled “Death of a Pig,” recounting his failed efforts to save a sick pig on the farm in Maine. Finding the creature dead in the barn, “the loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.”
After quoting this passage, Sims calls it a case of “empathizing at an almost frightening level with the pig,” and I’m not sure what he means. What White’s essay conveyed was empathy at the level of moral reflection, and without that all we’d have in Charlotte’s Web is a charming but idle yarn, with nothing to teach but graceful writing. The story is subversive in the gentle way of Bambi: A Life in the Woods, The Story of Ferdinand, and other children’s classics, conveying a little message of protest against things that young readers naturally recognize as mean and unfair, until some jaded adult comes along to explain that this is the way the world has always worked and no one has much choice in the matter. It offers a timeless lesson about a choice available to everyone, to show clemency to one’s fellow creatures—and who says that mercy must be confined to fairy tales? As Charlotte herself explains to the pardoned pig, “By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”
Matthew Scully is the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.