Jun

12

In The Web.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 12, 2008 |

Earlier this week I saw my first Aranea cavatica of the year just above my deck. According to to Peter F. Neumeyer’s The Annotated Charlotte’s Web, this is the species of spider E.B. White had in mind when he wrote Charlotte’s Web. They are beautiful spiders, and I always like seeing them around my house (although always on the outside). Being members of the Aranea genus, they spin round webs that get bigger as the summer progresses, and sometimes, in late fall, I’ll find the yellow egg sacs tucked up under a corner of the roof.

I think the lasting appeal of Charlotte’s Web is the metaphor of the web itself, and the fact that most of the major characters live within webs of their own which they must eventually must escape. For Wilbur (who has to be one of the most annoying protagonists imaginable–he’s whiny, hypersensitive, and selfish) it’s the fate of being slaughtered. Ironically his salvation means he’ll spend the rest of his life in a childlike state; even though he’ll never need to be saved again Charlotte’s children will watch over him. For Templeton the rat, of course, his web is his insatiable appetite, and, thanks to a deal with Wilbur, he gets to stuff himself for the rest of his life. When the old sheep tells him, “You would live longer…if you ate less,” Templeton replies, “Who wants to live forever?” Charlotte’s web is her own web, and, like Templeton, she’s accepted the life she has to live. Saving Wilbur is a diversion; her real purpose is to build her web, eat, and die. A lot of people have objected to death figuring so prominently in a children’s book, and, as Neumeyer says, White may have been thinking of them when he wrote in a letter,

I am working on a new book about a boa constrictor and a litter of hyenas. The boa constrictor swallows the babies one by one, and the mother hyena dies laughing.

That’ll teach the critics.

For Fern Arable, the only major human character in the book, who is Wilbur’s first savior and is the only person who shares in the intimate lives of the barn animals, there’s a web too, although it’s harder to make out. The book opens with Fern playing mother, but she’s the worst sort of mother–she’s controlling and unwilling to let go of her “child” Wilbur. Charlotte, who won’t live to see her children born, stands in sharp contrast. By the end of the book, though, Charlotte has learned to let go. She’s escaped from the web of her own childishness and fears. Talking to her brother, she says,

The most fun there is…is when the Ferris wheel stops and Henry and I are in the top car and Henry makes the car swing and we can see everything for miles and miles and miles.

It’s not clear whether Fern will marry Henry, and it’s not even important. What is important is that, for her, she’s moved on from the web she was trapped in, a web of being unable to cope with the real world. She’s risen above it. It’s no accident that a Ferris wheel looks like a giant version of Charlotte’s web, and that Fern, at its top, sees endless possibilities stretched out ahead of her. Like the ballooning spiders at the book’s end, she’s grown up and going outward, but, unlike them, she’ll determine the shape of her own web.


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