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Choosing Wilbur Over Bacon
A closer look at the cognitive dissonance encoded in Charlotte’s Web
Last year one of my favorite librarians took on the “Newbery challenge”: reading, in order, every children’s novel that has won the John Newbery Medal since its inception in 1922. I lingered at the circulation desk, curious to hear how well the older prizewinners had aged. Juli Anna pulled a face — half pained, half embarrassed for these bygone titans of children’s literature. “Many of the books are sexist and horribly racist,” she said. “It’s probably for the best that most children aren’t reading them anymore.”
If you’re like me, the first novel that comes to mind when someone says “Newbery” is Charlotte’s Web, a book so beloved that nobody seems to remember it won an Honor and not the actual prize. (Have you read Secret of the Andes, the Newbery Medal winner of 1952? Me neither.) It’s no surprise that so much of American children’s literature (even the award winners) should reflect the regrettable values of the times in which they were written, but surely E.B. White’s barnyard fable of friendship and loss is still pure…?
In case you have not anticipated my answer from the title of this article, let me introduce myself as a writer of children’s novels who is also an ethical vegan, meaning that I am delighted and infuriated by Charlotte’s Web in equal measure. Let’s start at the beginning, with one of the most captivating first lines ever written:
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?”
Fern argues passionately for Wilbur’s life, because like most children, she can see a part of herself in the tiny defenseless piglet. She makes this argument explicitly: “If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me?…I see no difference.” Her father relents, and Fern is permitted to feed and cuddle the rescued piglet.
We read in the following paragraph that the kitchen smells of coffee and bacon. Fern saves a pig’s life…before eating another pig. The cognitive dissonance is thus encoded by the end of page three.
It is a fact — not so widely remarked upon as it ought to be — that as a New Yorker-turned-farmer in Maine, E.B. White raised and slaughtered pigs on a regular basis. He got the idea for…
