We read Charlotte's Web aloud again. It is, of course, one of the great classics of U.S. children's literature in part because of the delicacy with which it handles the problems of social relationships: what it is to be alone and what it is to be a friend. But more than ever before, it struck me on this reading as a profound introduction to American culture. The riffs on boxing (as Charlotte recounts the story of her cousin catching the fly), and on religion (when Mr. Arable goes to tell the minister about the miracle of the web), on the dreariness of scientific authority (when Dr. Dorian muses to Mrs. Arable about the likelihood of animal speech) and the canniness of observation (when Mrs. Zuckerman observes that it is Charlotte rather than Wilbur who is extraordinary), the peculiar combination of the comic and the lyrical--all of these share some self-mocking quality that is intrinsic to the best of American culture, a refusal to take entirely seriously those things that we embrace, an awareness of their rootedness in a particular time and place.
My daughter claimed never to have heard it before, though I was sure I had already read it with her--and sure enough, there were passages that had her laughing, and saying, "Oh. I remember this part!" But there were things she had forgotten, too, big things--like the death of Charlotte. "Last Day," the chapter in which she dies, makes it very clear that Charlotte will not survive--Charlotte herself says so. But rather than allow her death to become the focus of the chapter, White redirects the readers' attention to the Wilbur's determination to do something for the friend he adores, and to the manner of her death: "No one was with her when she died." So the genius of this book, it seems to me, is that the death of the heroine is not the end of the story. And as a result, children are allowed to grieve her death in the context of a life that goes on, in the context of the life she was so determined to save--in the context of Wilbur's life. Their grief is therefore, the grief we feel for the loss of a beloved friend, not the grief and terror we may feel in the face of death itself. The specificity of Charlotte's death allows children to see that death is indeed a part of life, and that life goes on--not uncaringly or callously, but that it goes on nonetheless, and that we can continue to feel joy in it.
And then a few days later, I read this op-ed in the New York Times on hog farming and the appalling conditions in which pigs are currently raised, and the specter of death that hangs over Wilbur seemed so much less terrifying than the lives these pigs lead. See it for yourself here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/opinion/14niman.html?em&ex=1174190400&en=9c89521e6d388787&ei=5070
And then I went looking for humanely raised pork. So if you eat meat, as we do on occasion, you might want to know about Eat Wild, where you can locate producers of pastured-raised animals. Look here: http://www.eatwild.com/index.html