Home > Media > Books > E. B. White, Edith Goodkind Rosenwald, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress) - Charlotte's Web: Student Packet Grades 3-4
E. B. White, Edith Goodkind Rosenwald, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress) - Charlotte's Web: Student Packet Grades 3-4
befus's Full Review: E. B. White, Edith Goodkind Rosenwald, Lessing J. ...
For our family reading time, we've been reading some very good books...ones a bit advanced in length and complexity for our almost four year old, but nevertheless books that all of us, parents and daughter alike, can enjoy. We don't mind stretching her vocabulary or her imagination either, and such reading gives us many happy hours together as a threesome.
Yesterday we finished one such book and something happened that had never happened before. When I got to the final words on the final page, said "the end" and shut the covers, my little girl burst into tears. "Don't want it to end!" she wailed. "Want to read Wilbur again from the beginning!"
The book I'm referring to, of course, is E.B. White's classic, Charlotte's Web. Wilbur, my daughter's favorite character, is the protagonist pig of the tale, a sweet and unassuming pink and white porker born the runt of the litter and saved from an early death by eight year old Fern Arable. Fern has the novel's opening line, which may be one of the most startling in all of American literature, children's or adult's. "Where's Papa going with that ax?"
Though the story starts with Fern, the story doesn't belong to her or to any of the other human characters no matter how delightful they may be. We like Mr. and Mrs. Arable, Mr. and Mrs. Zuckerman (Fern's uncle farmer, who eventually buys the pig from her after she raises him on a baby bottle for the first few weeks), Lurvy the hired man, and Avery, Fern's somewhat bratty older brother, but they are not the main players here. Not by a long shot.
That honor belongs strictly to the animal inhabitants of Zuckerman's barn, where Wilbur happily resides in a warm manure heap. Here he (and we) get to know geese, sheep, a rat, and...most importantly of all...a small gray spider who spins her web in the corner of his pen. The spider's name is Charlotte, and she becomes the heart of this touching and unusual story. She and Wilbur strike up a beautiful friendship, cemented by the fact that Charlotte sets out to find a way to save Wilbur's life once he realizes that, in the way of a pig's usual life, he is slated to become bacon.
E.B White, beloved author of Stuart Little as well as many other books, penned Charlotte's Web in 1952. White was well known as a contributor to "grown-up" magazines like Harper's and The New Yorker, where his wife was fiction editor. He was an excellent prose stylist, known for simplicity and clarity. He brought all that talent, plus a warm, lyrical charm, to this wonderful book. I loved it for years -- I think I read it first when I was about ten -- and I still love it. From first to last page, it works a kind of story magic that captivates an almost four year old who's hearing it for the first time, and a nearly forty year old who's read it more times than I can recall.
It's not hard to capture exactly where such power lies. The simplicity and yet urgency of the situation propels the plot forward. The characters give it life. As I re-read it this time, I was struck that each animal character is rendered so clearly in such a short amount of prose. You really can describe each in two words at most: the garrulous, bossy geese; the placid sheep; the gluttonous, whiny rat Templeton. And most of all, the naive, exuberant Wilbur (prone to fits of melancholy) and the wise, imaginative and faithful Charlotte. OK, I gave her three adjectives, but then she's a complex character...she has eight legs, after all!
I learned so much from reading this story as a young child, not least the word "salutations" (Charlotte's "fancy way of saying hello"). White doesn't try to push difficult vocabulary at young readers, he simply delights in rich language and always seems to choose the best word for a given character or situation. If it's a word that he thinks young readers may have a hard time understanding, then he unpacks it contextually.
But besides the music of the language, I learned a lot about the importance of friendship and loyalty. Charlotte expends precious energy to help Wilbur in what is, of necessity, a short arachnid life. Her tiny size in no way diminishes her ability to live and give richly, and the implicit lesson here is that giving and real living and loving are inseparable. Charlotte's creativity and ingenuity have always inspired me: what an wonderful plan, to draw people's attention to how special Wilbur is by weaving words about him in her web! And so she does, first "Some Pig," then "Terrific," then "Radiant," and finally "Humble." The humans are in awe of these messages and what they might mean, and White doesn't miss any opportunity to poke gentle fun at the gullibility of people to crafty marketing and advertising campaigns, even when they're orchestrated by a spider and her fellow animal cohorts.
I get that humor far more now than I did as a kid, and enjoy it immensely. At the same time, White manages to convey the gentle truth that Charlotte's weaving, both the weaving of the words and the ordinary weaving of her web, is special and indeed, miraculous. I think one of my favorite lines in the whole story has to be Mrs. Zuckerman's tart reply to her husband when he tells her about the first words in the web and surmises that they have no ordinary pig in their barn: "Well, said Mrs. Zuckerman, "it seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider."
But almost nothing is seen as ordinary in this book, not even the most simple things we often take for granted or completely overlook, like a small and common gray spider in the corner of a barn. White infuses his story with a love for the gift of life, "this lovely world, these precious days" as Charlotte puts it, or as Wilbur muses inwardly toward the end, the glory of everything.
The book does have a bittersweet ending. In fact, I still cannot read some of the final chapters aloud without tears. I have a feeling that it was in part my own trembling voice in the final lines that caused my daughter to react with her own tears. But the sadness in the story is sadness over real things, real loss, real griefs, and they are counterbalanced by the joy that accompanies them so closely. Parents should be aware that the story does include a moving death (Charlotte's), but I can't really think of a more honest and loving way to approach the subject than the way it's approached here. My little girl was really too young to grasp the finer points of what was going on, though she caught the sense of sadness running through the final chapters like an undercurrent. Still, her ultimate memories from the book are the funny, joyful ones, like Wilbur taking a buttermilk bath and Wilbur getting Templeton to tie a string to his tail so he can try to learn to spin a web just like Charlotte.
No review of this book would be complete without mention of Garth Williams' beautiful pen and ink illustrations. I can't imagine the story without them -- he rendered Fern and Wilbur especially in such fun and lovely detail. Williams is also well known for his illustrations of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series.
Charlotte's Web is simply a classic in every way. A Terrific, Radiant, Humble story that deserves a place on your family shelf.
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