Having Uncle win the blue ribbon and Wilbur win the medal isn't just a way to tease the reader's emotions, but also a way to ensure that neither of the named pig characters has to become pork chops. Wilbur survives because he's become a celebrity, and Uncle survives because, as the local prize pig, he'll be in demand as a stud boar.
There's also a very logical reason for Uncle to have won: his size. Wilbur, having been a runt, was lucky to have even reached average size. It was likely Fern's care that let him grow even that large.
In addition, the only reason Wilbur was invited was all of the tourist money he was generating for the county. Uncle may be a prize pig, but Wilbur is a moneymaker.
Fern's family name is Arable, which is a word meaning "well-tilled or fertile land." Considering this is a farm family, this was an extremely good tongue-in-cheek move.
Charlotte's name sounds dangerously close to Charlatan. What do Charlatans tend to do with things like snake oil?
We know Wilbur's life was spared, but what ultimately became of his siblings? We know they were sold too, but we never find out what happened to them afterwards. It’s very likely that most (if not all) of them were slaughtered for meat.
Avery tried to catch Charlotte with a stick. Imagine if he’d succeeded - not only would Wilbur be heartbroken at the loss of his best friend, but without Charlotte around his fate would likely be sealed and he probably would have eventually been slaughtered, because Charlotte wouldn’t be there to help him by writing the messages in her web. Avery certainly deserved the punishment his mother later gave him for it.
Charlotte's descendants won’t have a longer lifespan than she did – only about a year each. It's barely even "fridge", given that it is alluded to in the book: "Each spring there were new little spiders hatching out to take the place of the old." Wilbur will have to watch Joy, Aranea and Nellie die, just like their mother, and then their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Every autumn or winter of the fifteen to twenty years Wilbur will live, he'll go through the pain of his best friends' deaths, and know that his new friends who hatch in the spring will only be with him a short time too.
People see a lot of positive things written about a pig in a spider web and are thus impressed with the pig. No one seems to care that there is a literate spider.
Edith points this out, stating that they don't have a remarkable pig, they have a remarkable spider. Homer dismisses it. The unspoken conclusion is that God put the words in the web, not some ordinary gray spider.
The novel touches on it very briefly. They don't grant Charlotte much credit, but when Mrs. Arable learns that Avery nearly hit "the Zuckermans' spider" with a stick, she's so shocked she sends him to bed without supper.
So, the Zuckermans see absolutely no problem in killing the pig that their niece spent so much time raising so lovingly for his meat? Does no one in this family, aside from Fern herself, see anything wrong with this at all?
It's pretty harsh, yeah, but I think the Zuckermans might have seen it as a learning opportunity. Fern won't be able to romanticize and anthropomorphize the animals forever — she's a farm girl, and slaughters will be a part of her life.
You also have to ask yourself why Fern's mom told her the truth about what Dad was going to do to the piglet in the first place. Yes, slaughter will be part of Fern's life as she grows up, but honestly, how did Mom think her sensitive eight-year-old was going to react? You could make the argument that in exposing Fern to this truth too soon, yet then saving the animal, her parents actually run the risk that she will romanticize and anthropomorphize far longer than is appropriate.
Probably because of the above, that, and a lot of parents don't want to "sugarcoat" the truth, in which case, that's why. The "romanticize and anthropomorphizing" probably wasn't intended.
There are several points in the book where other characters, including a doctor Fern's mother talks to, brush off the oddity of a young girl spending all day watching a pig in a barn because she’s a child who's ever changing. The doctor in particular says that young children can change a lot in the span of a few months, let alone a year, and that Fern would have moved on from Wilbur and found something new to occupy her time - or rather, someone, namely a boy named Henry Fussy.
And he’s right: At the county fair where Wilbur's life is saved for good, Fern develops a crush on Henry, and ignores Wilbur - the pig she loved and raised - in favor of spending all her time riding the fair’s attractions (namely the Ferris wheel) with her new crush, not even coming by once to visit him alone. And when she and her family find out that Uncle, another pig, won first prize, Fern, instead of being terrified that Charlotte’s plan has seemingly failed, starts badgering her mother to give her money so she can go back on the Ferris wheel with Henry, within clear earshot of Wilbur. She obsesses over that moment on the wheel with Henry even months later, and eventually stops coming to visit Wilbur as often out of a desire to “avoid childish things, like sitting on a milk stool near a pigpen”. So even though Wilbur was saved by the end, Fern slowly lost her emotional investment in Wilbur in favor of Henry.
Are you referring to the book? In the films at least, Fern, while she did grow more interested in Henry, still did care about Wilbur. She cried when she found out the other pig won first prize, and she was overjoyed when Wilbur did receive a prize. She did leave him shortly after to spend time with Henry, but only after it became clear Wilbur would be okay. And she did become more interested in Henry and less interested in Wilbur by the end, but she still loved Wilbur although she visited him less often than she used to.
Probably has something to do with Values Dissonance. I was pretty shocked myself to see that, considering how Fern raised Wilbur since he was a piglet and was clearly very attached to him, and even visited him regularly after he was sold, the adults would not realize that this was not the kind of pig who should be slaughtered for meat. Indeed, nowadays this would be seen as questionable by many, but at the time the book was written, being butchered and eaten was considered the main purpose of raising a pig on a farm. I used to wonder why, even if they wanted ham, why they couldn't get it from somewhere else. Nowadays, it's easy to buy ham at a supermarket for a few dollars. But back then, most farmers got most of their meat from their own livestock, as it was cheaper and easier than buying meat from elsewhere.
Charlotte making Templeton help out when he's needed was actually her way of saving Templeton as well. It was imperative for Wilbur to stay alive as Templeton also eats whatever they give Wilbur for food. Without it, he would be short on food, and since would be winter soon, scavenging food would become extremely difficult too. Templeton really was working to save his butt as well as Wilbur's. Food always was Templeton's motivation, and it was always how the farm animals got him to do things.
This is explicit. Both the Goose and Charlotte tell Templeton that he'll have nothing to eat in the winter if Wilbur is killed; Charlotte tells him, "If Wilbur dies, then you'll die... of starvation!"
Another thing to this, without Wilbur's slops, he'd have to scavenge more closer to the farmhouse and that won't end well, 'specially in the winter.
When Templeton brings back a wrapper that says "Crunchy" and Charlotte shoots down the idea, mentioning that it would make people think of 'crunchy bacon,' Wilbur begins to faint. This time, Charlotte tells him she forbids him to faint, and after a few seconds of shuddering and lip-quivering, he manages to stay up. It's kind of brilliant because maybe Charlotte knows that she's nearing the end of her life and she's possibly either preparing Wilbur for life without her mothering and reassurance. Another reason could be that she thinks Wilbur's fainting habit might ruin her plan to save his life if the humans see it. A sickly, fainting pig would have very little value (and would likely get slaughtered for a different reason). Either way, she wanted Wilbur to appear strong - not weak and needy. She wanted him to be seen as special.
Wilbur at one point makes Charlotte give up eating a moth, and she immediately comments that she could have used the nourishment for her egg sac. That probably contributed to her death, since the Tear Jerker page notes that Charlotte should have had at least some more weeks ahead of her before dying at first frost.
The other sheep either making fun of or excluding Cardigan in the 2003 sequel may be based on an old myth that says if the first lamb of the year is born black, then the farm will not be very prosperous that year. The rest of the sheep didn't just see Cardigan as a different, clumsy misfit, they saw him as a bad omen! While we don't know if Cardigan was THE firstborn lamb that spring, given that there are several other (albeit white-wooled) lambs seen in his introduction, but they could still see him as a sign of bad luck. One sheep even calls him a "disgrace", so there's some vague evidence to back this theory up.
Or they could all just be jerks. Or racist.
I would say that Cardigan is at least slightly younger than the others, given that he appears smaller and weaker than them. Perhaps the rest of the lambs were born a little earlier, and Cardigan was the first lamb of spring, so it could still tie into the whole "black lamb means bad luck" thing easily.
Or, alternatively, the rest of the flock knows that black wool doesn't really do all that well commercially because it can't be dyed like white wool can. Not sure if a bunch of sheep would really understand such things, but hey, vanity does things to ya. Kinda makes this troper wish they'd elaborated more on WHY they treated Cardigan so badly other than the "he's different from us, so we'd better bully him" approach.
I counted the number of lambs in the flock: there's a total of thirteen, with there being twelve white lambs and Cardigan. If Cardigan is the youngest of the bunch, thirteen is an unlucky number. Poor kid doesn't really have a lot of support in his corner all around, does he?
Charlotte sounds distinctly wistful when she and Wilbur watch Fern happily riding the Ferris wheel with her new crush. She's not just feeling that way because she won't live to see Fern's romance blossom: she's feeling that way because even if she's not of a species of spider that eats their mate, her own babies' father is probably dead due to male spiders' lifespans being shorter than females'.
In a retort to the book example above the live action movie uses a much more logical realistic answer.
Interviewer: Where's the spider who did all this? Homer: Well...we looked everywhere, but we couldn't find one. (cue to Wilbur and Charlotte giggling to each other)
Of course, that ignores Fern's Jerkass brother wanting to capture the spider.
