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Death of a Pig by E.B. White (1948)

a drawing from Charlotte's Web of the pig Wilbur standing under a cobweb that spells 'terrific'

From the Atlantic in 1948, Death of a Pig by E.B. White is about the story that inspired the author to write Charlotte’s Web a few years later.

The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.

Once in a while something slips — one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts. My pig simply failed to show up for a meal. The alarm spread rapidly. The classic outline of the tragedy was lost. I found myself cast suddenly in the role of pig’s friend and physician — a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop. I had a presentiment, the very first afternoon, that the play would never regain its balance and that my sympathies were now wholly with the pig. This was slapstick - the sort of dramatic treatment which instantly appealed to my old dachshund, Fred, who joined the vigil, held the bag, and, when all was over, presided at the interment. When we slid the body into the grave, we both were shaken to the core. The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.

Charlotte’s Web was a deeply personal book for White — even years later, when recording the radiant audiobook version, White could barely get past the death of Charlotte at the end:

The producer later said that it took him 17 takes to read the death scene of Charlotte. And finally, they would walk outside, and E.B. White would go, this is ridiculous, a grown man crying over the death of an imaginary insect. And then, he would go in and start crying again when he got to that moment.

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Tra H

We had a spider build a large web on our front porch this summer. I generally leave spiders alone when I see them because they're good insect control, and this one definitely was. Every night, like clockwork, she'd crawl out of the corner where she spent most of her day, and stand sentry right in the middle of her web, waiting for a gnat or mosquito to trip the wire then she'd sprint over and wrap it up quick. We watched it grow all season, and she got huge, by the end of the summer she was regularly catching moths and dropping the discarded wings on our table for us to clean in the morning.

About a week ago, I noticed that She wasn't coming out of her corner to eat anymore. We didn't know what was happening until this weekend, when She was actually guarding a clutch of eggs behind her. We started to wonder if it was time we got rid of it all, since we really didn't want a spider nursery in our house. I went searching for what type of spider it was to see what would come next and learned it was a cat-faced spider. Cat-faced spiders stop eating and die shortly after laying their clutch and once the eggs hatch the little spiders make parachutes and jump off into the wind to get carried on their way, just like the ending of Charlotte's Web (after some light sibling cannibalism). So we're letting the eggs stay, and hopefully we'll get another spider friend next summer.

Monica

Good lord I love this comment so much. I do the same thing with all the spiders around my house. I tell them all they’re cool so long as they stay in spider-appropriate places and don’t try to sneak in and climb in my mouth when I sleep. When they step out of line I give them a stern admonishing and gently relocate. I do kill flies though and feel like a terrible serial killer in fly world as a result.

Charlotte’s Web is the first book that made me cry. I suspect I’m far from alone in that regard. It probably has a lot to do with why I eventually got a pet pig as an adult.

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