"The Miracle of the Web": Community, Desire, and Narrativity in Charlotte's Web

In the opening scene of Charlotte's Web, Mr. Arable sets out to slaughter the recently-born runt because, as he tells his daughter, a "weakling makes trouble" within the "litter" (3). At the end of the novel, we are told that "Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days" (183). What happens between Wilbur's perilous beginning and his auspicious maturity has much to do with a sense of community. Regarded as a nuisance within and to his original community, the litter into which he was born, Wilbur is saved from the fate of most pigs—"smoked bacon and ham" as the insensitive old sheep puts it (49)—because at the end he is made to belong to another community made up of his human "friends and admirers." Wilbur's integration into this human community, of course, is the result of Charlotte's work. Those who "often visited" Wilbur do so because they never forgot "the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web" (183). Also, as most readers realize, Wilbur's integration into the human community is just one example of the novel's concern with demonstrating other forms of integration, especially Fern's maturation and entry into the order of sexuality. In fact, these two forms of integration form parallel plots in this novel. At the very moment Wilbur receives a special award from the Fair committee, and thereby gains a license to live without the fear of gracing a dinner table, Fern runs off "ducking and dodging through the crowd, in search of Henry" (156). Several enlightening congruences exist between Wilbur's integration into the human community and Fern's into the realm of sexual desire (symbolized by her search for Henry Fussy), but the basic similarity involves the issue I would argue to be underlying the novel as a whole. Charlotte's Web may be said to be a representation of the integral function of narratives in the orientation and reorientation of individual and communal desires.

As such a representation, White's novel anticipates some recent theorizing about desire as a social construct. Arguing against a recrudescence of a facile romanticism which stipulates that desire is the expression of an innate recognition of absence (that it is a form of natural longing), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend that desire "has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, desire" (399). In the same vein, René Girard states that desire is never original and never natural. Rather, an individual learns to desire an object because that individual sees a representation of another individual—fictional or real—desiring the same object or a simulacrum of the same object (Deceit 1-52). As he phrases it elsewhere, desire is always "a second-hand desire" ("Mimetic Desire" 2). It is second-hand because it is imitative (as Girard puts it), an "assemblage" (as Deleuze and Guattari put it), or a result of conforming to an already established pattern. Desire is, in other words, a construct of culture. In Charlotte's Web, White represents this theoretical debate on desire as either a natural effluence or a cultural form in the scene of Mrs. Arable's visit to Dr. Dorian.

Thinking that her daughter's interest in the animals at the Zuckermans' farm "didn't seem natural," Mrs. Arable decides to visit Dr. Dorian (107). The visit falls into two distinct parts. In the first part, Dr. Dorian opens his diagnosis with some preliminary remarks on the difference between culture and nature. Seemingly unimpressed by the fact that the spider had written a word in her web, Dr. Dorian notes that the very act of a spider's weaving a web is itself a "miracle" (109). In response to Mrs. Arable's contention that she herself can knit and crochet, Dr. Dorian notes that she was "taught" to do so while a spider "knows how to spin a web without any instructions from anybody." While Mrs. Arable is taught to perform her manual...