Charlotte's Web Culture

E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web reflects the development of what Warren I. Susman has termed the “culture of personality.” There is a change from an older culture of character to a newer culture of personality that is put into relief in the novel, where the rural Zuckerman farm is compared against an developing society in which self-importance has become essential for success. While White acknowledges the need for confident self-importance, he also questions the culture of personality, reviving aspects of the culture of character as a helpful to the competitive and selfish standards of modern life. An overview of the story is also given “The only thing wrong with my big brother,” Sally announces in the stage musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie

Published a couple of years after the first Peanuts comic strip, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web reflects similar cultural concerns. In the book of Charlotte’s Web, Wilbur must become famous in order to survive, leaving the confidence of the barn for the spotlight of the County Fair. In that scenario, White’s book imitates the development of culture of personality. “The older culture—Puritan-republican, producer capitalist—demanded something it called character, which stressed moral qualities, whereas the newer culture insisted on personality, which emphasized being liked and admired”. Susman’s Culture as History reads this change against the background of twentieth-century expansion. He discovers the culture of character in the nineteenth century. He relates the rise of the manufacturing United States in the opening decades of the twentieth century to the increasing domination of personality over character in American culture. What Susman places as a historical change from an older culture of character to a newer culture of personality is often represented in children’s literature as a three-dimensional shift from a small, friendly social environment to a more unprotected and public

While Alcott and Baum show 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-importance. White interviews the culture of personality by reviving parts of the culture of character as a corrective to the competitive and selfish standards of the current marketplace. The demands of the culture of character are appropriately summed up in Little Women by Marmee, the commanding grandmother 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 shaped 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”