The Gospel According to Charlotte's Web

On children's literature, the least of these, and the power of imagination

May 5-9 is national Children’s Book Week! I couldn’t let the occasion pass without talking a bit about children’s literature, one of my very favorite things to think and write about—let alone some of my very favorite books to read. In this essay, I’m primarily thinking about middle grade novels, but here are some recent picture books I reviewed for the ERB and some more picture book reviews that just went live this week.

Chris will be back next week with another installment in his series reflecting on the 40th anniversary of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. You can read the first two parts of that reflection here.

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I can count on one hand the books I’ve reread in my life—Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Beartown, Fahrenheit 451. But the book I’ve read more than any other is Charlotte’s Web. I read it initially as a first grader, though the memory is hazy. I reread it later in elementary school, and then much later in a graduate-level children’s literature course. When I taught first grade, reading Charlotte’s Web was the bright spot of the school year. And all through my oldest son’s youngest years, I couldn’t wait to get to read it together. We finally did during the summer before his kindergarten year.¹ It is my favorite book—of any genre, written for children or adults, and it illustrates so well why I think children’s literature matters for adults, especially now.

My one year of teaching first grade was, overall, pretty demoralizing, but I will never, ever forget what it was like to read Charlotte’s Web to those kids, who sat transfixed, exactly the opposite of their behavior most of the time. One of my students was a boy named Yani²—well behind grade level, little interest in learning, frequently aggressive toward his classmates, often exasperating. As I read the final pages, Yani kept scooting closer and closer to my feet. His hands were clasped under his chin as he listened. When I turned the final page and said “The end,” Yani sat up straight, gasped, and with tears in his eyes, said, “What?! Read it again!”

When Charlotte’s Web was published in 1952, the same year that Queen Elizabeth took the throne and Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president, the writer Eudora Welty reviewed it in The New York Times. She wrote, “As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done.” I think Yani would agree.

The protagonist of You’ve Got Mail is Kathleen Kelly, who owns a children’s bookstore, and when she first meets Joe Fox, she begins rambling about her store and her love of books and utters a line that has become ubiquitous: “When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.” I do love Charlotte’s Web because of the way the story was woven into my childhood. But it’s also walked with me through so many seasons of life, not only as a child but also a young adult, a newlywed first-year teacher, a mom, a writer. 

But I love Charlotte’s Web most of all because it paints such a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God. When children’s literature is discussed in Christian circles, books like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe often dominate the conversation, perhaps because we know so much about the faith of the author. I don’t know if E.B. White was a person of faith, but I do know that Charlotte’s Web portrays a counter-cultural way of living and honoring one another, of making our world more whole. On Zuckerman’s farm, it is the despised, the lowly, the feared—the rat, the pig, the spider—who are best able to see each creature for the gift they are and to create a home where all are seen and cared for. 

Wilbur begins as a runt who must be killed because of the burden he is on the farm system, because he will take more than he can give. Later, he faces death because suddenly he is valuable—not for who he is a creature but because of what he can provide for the farmer’s table. Wilbur is a helpless weakling; he is small, afraid, and often lonely. 

But over time, through his friendship with Charlotte and the way she gathers all the farm animals into participation in her life-saving mission, Zuckerman’s farm becomes a home where each creature is seen as infinitely valuable, not because of their utility or productivity but because of their inherent radiance, because the community would be diminished without them. 

If Zuckerman is the portrayal of a distant and all-powerful god (the kind who creates for his own benefit alone and whose presence is a threat), Charlotte is the story’s Christ figure. E.B. White could have made her a terrifying black widow or even a grotesquely alluring yellow orb weaver, but she is instead a common brown garden spider, mostly overlooked and when noticed, despised. To save Wilbur’s life, Charlotte uses the power of words—much like our own storytelling savior who arrives with a sword in his mouth. Charlotte’s words are a beatitude, revealing all that is true of Wilbur and the least of these.

When Rachel Held Evans described the Kingdom of God in her book, Searching for Sunday, she said, “This is what God’s kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.” This is the exact picture E.B. White painted in Charlotte’s Web, and so it has become a story I return to again and again when my imagination needs renewing, when I need to reconsider what it means to lay down my life for a friend.

Imagination is not merely about make-believe; imagination is a powerful act by which we shape and transform our understanding of what is possible. Scholars like Willie James Jennings and

Karen Swallow Prior

have explored the ways our imagination and theology inform one another for both good and ill. At the Missio Alliance Awakenings Gathering in March, artist Makoto Fujimura spoke of imagination as part of our mission as Christians, saying that the work of humanity is the manifestation of our imagination. He quoted Shakespeare’s words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “And as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.” We must participate in the act of imagining so God’s dream for the world—that is, shalom—can become an ever-expanding and tangible reality. It is exactly this kind of imagination I find at the heart of books like Because of Winn-Dixie, The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street³, and Front Desk.

A collection of some of my favorite novels. The fact that their covers coordinate is just a serendipitous delight.

The Guardian recently published the results of a study from Nielsen and HarperCollins, in which only 40% of parents said reading aloud to their children is fun. I wish the survey asked parents to list some of the books their families had recently read together, because I also would hate reading aloud if I was only reading, say, Dog Man. I find even the Harry Potter books exhausting to read aloud, with their clunky language and extremely long chapters. (This isn’t to say that both Dog Man and Harry Potter don’t have their place in children’s literature! They absolutely do, and I’m glad they exist, but that doesn’t make them good read-alouds.)

As I prepared to write this piece, my husband quipped, “So are you going to write about how children’s books are mislabeled and should just be called ‘books’?” But no, that’s not it at all. Children have unique needs and perspectives that must be seen, honored, and attended to; they deserve literature made just for them. But as adult readers, we do ourselves a disservice when we dismiss those books as not for us. In the same way riding “It’s a Small World” repeatedly is not going to turn someone into a Disney Adult, a grown-up whose only children’s literature experience is with Jimmy Fallon’s board books might dismiss kidlit.⁴ On the other hand, many adults enjoy Bluey and Pixar movies, and not merely because the creators work in an occasional mature joke. We love them because we are able to connect with parts of ourselves we might otherwise never slow down to notice, and because they help us view the children in our lives with a fresh perspective. Story is powerful, and as C.S. Lewis said, “a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story.”

We make so much room in society for Disney Adults and parents who enjoy Bluey more than their kids, so why not children’s literature? Even Welty, in her obviously positive review of Charlotte’s Web, began it by joking that reading a children’s book, “…is nice for us older ones as it calls for big type.” It’s as though she felt the need to justify her reading of this book to her peers, even as she goes on to praise the book for its nearly-perfect writing and deep themes. I wonder if we would enjoy reading to our kids more if we first learned to love to read children’s literature ourselves—not merely as something we loved as children, but as something we enjoy and are curious about in the present.

In March of 2020, right as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning in earnest in the United States, novelist and bookstore owner Ann Patchett wrote a piece for The New York Times (gift link) about her experience reading the catalogue of two-time Newbery Award winner Kate DiCamillo.⁵ Patchett first picked up The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, and in words that echo Welty’s experience of Charlotte’s Web, she said this:

I couldn’t remember when I had read such a perfect novel. I didn’t care what age it was written for. The book defied categorization. I felt as if I had just stepped through a magic portal, and all I had to do to pass through was believe that I wasn’t too big to fit. This beautiful world had been available to me all along but I had never bothered to pick up the keys to the kingdom.

Books like Charlotte’s Web and DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie are some of my favorites because they expertly hold both sorrow and joy. My student Yani is not the only reader to cry through the end of Charlotte’s Web. At no point did E.B. White attempt to shield his young readers from how very, very difficult life in this world can be, but the story is not without hope. As Christians who live in the “now but not yet” reality of the kingdom of God, we have a particular charge to hold the world’s sorrow and the hope of redemption together, to recognize there is never one without the other. This is hard work. But just as Jesus told parables, we can turn to stories to reveal how to hold these seemingly opposing forces together, shifting our perspectives until reconciliation and redemption are the predominant lens. When I read Patchett say, “…all I had to do to pass through was believe that I wasn’t too big to fit,” I am reminded of the words of Jesus in Matthew 19:13: “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”Children’s literature can be our best teacher and our best tool in learning to see and practice a redemptive worldview.

In a letter to fellow children’s author Matt de la Peña, DiCamillo wrote, “I have tried for a long time to figure out how E. B. White did what he did [in Charlotte’s Web], how he told the truth and made it bearable.” How did White manage such an unabashed and honest look at death and loss and injustice? I was surprised to hear DiCamillo voice this question at all, because it’s something she does so expertly in her own books.⁶

The Tale of Despereaux, for example, begins with a mouse who is the only one of his litter born alive; his name, Despereaux, comes from the French for despair. Eventually he meets a rat named Chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is a Renaissance painting technique that emphasizes contrasts between light and dark, but the dungeon-dwelling rat should never see the light of day. Chiascuro’s parents had a dark sense of humor. Yet before the reader meets either rodent, the book’s epigraph says, “The world is dark, and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story.”

Many books for adults don’t worry about holding that tension or contrast. Certainly, adults are (in theory) able to delve deeper into dark stories, and of course the gift of all reading is the opportunity to explore these depths without actually living them. But because children’s authors are writing with younger audiences in mind, extra care is taken. I don’t always know that a writer for adults can be trusted with my heart in the same way I know I can trust an author like Kate DiCamillo or Kwame Alexander. And I wonder if we should all be caring for our hearts and minds with this extra measure of tenderness—perhaps in a manner the grown-ups who cared for us were unable to do during our own childhoods or maybe just in a way that’s required after years of a 24/7 onslaught of terrible news.

Maybe, if we read more children’s literature, our imagination for redemption and reconciliation could grow. Maybe we could learn to be more honest about how hard things really are. And maybe we could learn to trust one another again.

In his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” Wendell Berry writes, “When despair for the world grows in me/and I wake in the night at the least sound/in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,/I go and lie down where the wood drake/rests…” When in need of hope, Berry turns to nature.

Me? I turn to children’s literature.

1. It occurs to me just now how badly I owe my younger children a reading of this book! Whoops.

2. Not his real name.

3. The author of the Vanderbeekers series, Karina Yan Glaser, has just been announced as one of the speakers at the Festival of Faith & Writing in 2026!

4. I love Jimmy Fallon! I hate those books.

5. DiCamillo is one of only seven authors to have won the Newbery twice. This year’s winner, Erin Entrada Kelly, is another two-time winner, for her books Hello, Universe and The First State of Being. I’ve yet to read either, but my 11 year-old thought they were excellent.

6. I can not recommend this On Being interview with Kate DiCamillo highly enough. In it, they discuss this Ann Patchett pieces, as well as DiCamillo’s exchange with Matt de la Peña.