Like all great children's books, Charlotte's Web speaks frankly to children's hearts while concealing a craftier meaning for adults. I read the book so often as a kid, I thought I had emptied it of all surprise. But as time goes on I see how much I missed: I see how much it's a story about writers and writing.
Surely the great Charlotte A. Cavatica, barnyard spider and friend to Wilbur the pig, is E. B. White's vision of an ideal writer. She is a weaver of webs as the human writer is a weaver of tales. She is sk**ful, meticulous, and, like Walt Whitman's spider, patient.
She is concise. (Recall the command in Strunk's Elements of Style, which White kept intact in his famous revision: “Omit needless words.”) She writes just five words in her brief life, but she makes them count. They save a life—the life of a friend. Here, White seems to say, is what a writing career can do.
Though retiring and even aloof on her elevated perch, she is supremely loving and loyal. Her words draw attention to the thing they praise, not the praiser. Substitute “spider” for “pig” and her descriptions of Wilbur could apply equally to herself: “Some Pig,” “Terrific,” “Radiant,” “Humble.” White's stepson, Roger Angell, has remarked that: “Among other things, she is a New Englander.”
Although Charlotte is a h**ne, she is not sentimentalized. White was proud to have “pulled no punches” in depicting her. She has a harsh streak, also a vain streak. (Few humans are prepared to admire the beauty of a spider, but she admires her own looks matter-of-factly.) A realistic arachnid, she subsists on foods that aren't pretty: “flies, bugs, gra**hoppers, choice beetles, moths, bu*terflies, tasty co*kroaches … anything that's careless enough to get caught in my web.” As grownups we see that even this is a joke about writers, who take their material wherever they can find it, and with any luck spin beauty out of unlovely things. (Similarly, she sends Templeton the rat out to gather sources of inspiration amidst the wrappers in the garbage.)
She dies young, but not before spawning children. She calls them her “magnum opus”: perhaps White's way of putting writing in its place.
Charlotte was almost certainly modeled on her creator's wife of fifty years, New Yorker editor Katharine White. The book ends with these sentences:
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
As a kid I got choked up at Charlotte's d**h. Now it's this eulogy that gets me. It's cla**ically simple and shoulders the weight of a lifetime's experience. In that word “writer” it slips us the key to all that's come before. The hidden meaning is not so hidden after all—or like the spider in her web, like the author in his book, it's hidden in plain sight.