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<i>Charlotte's Web</i>: A Lonely Fantasy of Love

1980; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0424

1543-3374

John L. Griffith,

American and British Literature Analysis

Charlotte's Web:A Lonely Fantasy of Love John Griffith (bio) Charlotte's Web expresses as poignantly as anything E. B. White has written his bright and whimsical but fundamentally melancholy sense of life. In this story of Wilbur, a good-hearted but lonely and vulnerable pig, White creates a consoling fantasy in which a small Everyman survives and triumphs over the pathos of being alone. In an essay on freedom published twelve years earlier, White describes the fundamental existential situation of Charlotte's Web: Intuitively, I've always been aware of the vitally important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to himself, and to be identified with all things, to stand self-reliant, taking advantage of his haphazard connection with a planet, riding his luck, and following his bent with the tenacity of a hound. My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all. It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself through the "I." This elusive sensation is moving and memorable. It comes early in life: a boy, we'll say, sitting on the front steps on a summer night, thinking of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a new perception and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets, overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification with the natural company of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the universal perplexing question: "What is 'I'?" Or a little girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird, leaning with her elbows on the window-sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part of the complete story. Or to an older youth, [End Page 111] encountering for the first time a great teacher who by some chance word or mood awakens something and the youth beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of identity with God—an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair with freedom.1 Early in life, every child experiences a mildly mystical sense of his participation in a vast natural order—as a separable, individual part. This experience provides the basis for his sense of himself, the indispensable first part of the answer to his question, "What is 'I'?" But besides this explicit point that White is making one should consider the particular atmosphere with which he dramatizes the moment of insight into the link between the self and the cosmos: "a boy . . . sitting on the front steps on a summer night, thinking of nothing in particular" or "a girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird, leaning with her elbow on the windowsill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death" or "an older youth, encountering for the first time a great teacher"—the experience is essentially a lonely one, the receiving of "some chance word or mood" from without, impinging on the youth's sensibilities. This realization of one's self in the universe, then, has to do with the impact of language—the chance word of a teacher; it has to do with idleness, with "thinking of nothing in particular," and with the thought of death. Charlotte's Web is the consolation White offers to the child who has lived and continues to live in the presence of this "lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being," freedom, and in the lonely realization of one's individuality. He approaches that task by creating a character and set of circumstances which dramatize the anxieties of that situation. Wilbur is the runt of his litter, rescued from infanticide and befriended by Fern. But, then, after an interlude during which Fern mothers him, he is sold to an alien farm where he is the only pig in a...