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Copywork
About This Passage
Selected for its counterpoint of registers: Wilbur's sobs-racked prose against Charlotte's clipped composure. The passage carries three vocabulary words (spinnerets, desolation, thrashing — or with near-neighbors desolation and ridiculous in the full scene) and captures White's signature technique of placing the dignity of the dying against the extravagance of the grieving.
"I'm done for," she replied. "In a day or two I'll be dead. I haven't even strength enough to climb down into the crate. I doubt if I have enough silk in my spinnerets to lower me to the ground." Hear...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize Chapter 21 in analytical terms: Charlotte's seasonal valediction to Wilbur, her philosophical defense of friendship as a tremendous thing, the revelation that she will not return to the barn, Templeton's transactional agreement to rescue the egg sac, the silent wink-and-wave, and White's austere closing paragraph.
Discussion Questions
- Charlotte's speech to Wilbur unspools through the barn's calendar — autumn leaves, Christmas, winter snows, the song sparrow, the frogs, the warm wind. Analyze the rhetorical function of this seasonal catalog. Why does White choose ritual repetition and concrete natural imagery rather than philosophical or emotional abstraction? What does Charlotte give Wilbur through the list itself, apart from what it names?
- When Wilbur asks why she has done so much for him, Charlotte answers: You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. Examine Charlotte's rejection of the calculus of desert. What ethic of friendship does White propose through her refusal to treat her gifts as debts, and how does that ethic sit in relation to classical or Christian frameworks of virtue that the reader might bring to the text?
+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide
Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Extraordinary in scale, force, or significance; so great as to evoke awe or trembling.
Item 2
A state of utter ruin, abandonment, or anguished emptiness of spirit.
Item 3
The silk-producing organs at the end of a spider's abdomen.
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
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