Charlotte's Web — Chapter 2

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 2's argument and narrative arc, then identify the central tension E.B. White is developing — between the accumulation of specific domestic love and the farm's indifferent economic logic — and evaluate whether the author handles it honestly and effectively. Consider whether the chapter's refusal to argue Fern out of her loss is itself a position.

Discussion Questions

1. Martha Nussbaum argues in Love's Knowledge that the particulars of a life — the specific meals, the specific rooms, the remembered gestures — are not decoration around moral life but its substance. Chapter 2 is composed almost entirely of such particulars: Fern's bottle feeding at dawn, Wilbur's straw tunnel, the doll carriage, the muddy brook at the edge of the water. Where does E.B. White agree with Nussbaum's claim, and where — if anywhere — does he go beyond it? What does his ending on the unparticular phrase 'a manure pile in the cellar of Zuckerman's barn' do to the philosophical force of what has come before?
2. Mr. Arable says 'he's got to go, Fern,' and the chapter closes with the pig's removal without Fern producing a single argument against it. How should we read her silence? As exhaustion, as maturity, as the author's acknowledgment that some losses are not argument-shaped, or as a quiet refusal to dignify the question by answering it? Defend your reading against the two strongest alternatives.

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