Advertising the Self: The Culture of Personality in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web

“The only thing wrong with my big brother,” Sally proclaims in the stage musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, “is lack of confidence.” The hapless Charlie Brown, who appeared in the first Peanuts comic strip in 1950 (Keillor x), is an icon of mid-twentieth-century American culture. Although he is universally acknowledged to be “a good man,” his sister Sally implies that goodness is not enough; in addition to being virtuous, one must be confident. Published two years after the first Peanuts comic strip, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web reflects similar cultural concerns. In that novel, Wilbur must become famous in order to survive, leaving the intimacy of the barn for the spotlight of the County Fair. In that sense, White’s novel reflects the emergence of what Warren I. Susman has termed the “culture of personality”: “The older culture—Puritan-republican, producercapitalist—demanded something it called ‘character,’ which stressed moral qualities, whereas the newer culture insisted on ‘personality,’ which emphasized being liked and admired” (xxii). Published in 1973, Susman’s Culture as History reads this shift against the backdrop of twentieth-century urbanization. He locates the culture of character in the nineteenth century and links the rise of the industrialized United States in the opening decades of the twentieth century to the increasing dominance of personality over character in American culture.¹

What Susman situates as a historical shift from an older culture of character to a newer culture of personality is often represented in children’s literature as a spatial shift from a small, intimate social environment to a more exposed and public one. Wilbur’s transition from barn to County Fair mimics similar transitions in novels published both before and after Susman’s historical divide. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for instance, features Meg’s movement from the intimacy of the March household to the glare of Vanity Fair, while L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz narrates Dorothy’s movement from a one-room house in Kansas to the urban environment of the Emerald City. Susman’s distinction provides a useful vocabulary for analyzing such novels precisely because they situate the cultures of character and personality as coexisting in tension with one another. While Alcott and Baum depict the culture of personality as something that can be rejected and escaped, White sets up a more complex relation in Charlotte’s Web as he acknowledges the need for confident self-promotion but interrogates the culture of personality, resurrecting aspects of the culture of character as a corrective to the competitive and egoistic norms of the modern marketplace.

Meg’s Dilemma: Modesty vs. Self-Promotion

The demands of the culture of character are aptly summed up in Little Women by Marmee, the authoritative matriarch of Alcott’s novel: “Learn to know and value the praise which is worth having,” she tells her daughter Meg, “and to excite the admiration of excellent people by being modest as well as pretty” (150). Marmee’s words are spoken to Meg upon her return from “Vanity Fair,” where she has allowed herself to be styled by the fashionable Belle Moffat, who “crimped and curled her hair, … polished her neck and arms with some fragrant powder, touched her lips with coralline salve” and “would have added ‘a soupçon of rouge’, if Meg had not rebelled” (139). The problem with Meg’s appearance is not that it bespeaks sexual availability or defies the social norms of her time; rather, this makeover is problematic for Alcott because it suggests that Meg is participating in a vulgar culture of self-promotion. Published in 1868, Alcott’s novel depicts the Moffats’ ballroom as an environment of public scrutiny that elicits a need for performance and artificiality, foreshadowing the traits Susman would later herald as hallmarks of a culture of personality.

Marmee’s insistence on the need for modesty, rather than self-promotion, situates her within Susman’s notion of the culture of character. For Susman, the word “character” encapsulates a set of virtues that functioned in nineteenth-century...