Charlotte's Web (3)

     The Loss of Innocence.. eh, Perhaps

     We witness the first day of a milky white pig with the sun shining through his ears. We watch the runt grow. Spring and summer zip by but these seasons don't push Wilbur forward , they do not force him into maturity. Fall comes along with a spider, a motherly, educated (seeming...) and sophisticated friend. Along with Charlotte comes a talkitive sheep, one who tells Wilbur of his looming death. By knowing that death exists and that he's heading towards it, Wilbur begins the slow emersion from his child-like state.
     By slow, I mean that well past the 100 page mark, my annotaions about Wilbur remained critical of his constant whining, selfishness and dependance on others. It was only in the last few dozen pages, when Wilbur displayed the traits of a typical hero (haha! yet another archetype!) by bringing Charlotte's egg sac back to the barn with him. But, even then, it was done for selfish reasons, Wilbur wanted friends. Even when Charlotte's 511 (I'm accounting for those who stayed behind) children flew away in the wind, Wilbur had tears flowing out of his eyes, not out of paternal love, knowing that his 'children' would never return to him, but out of the misery of losing those who provided companionship for him. In the end, Wilbur did remain a child. There are areas, though, that Wilbur did progress in, his vocabulary expanded quite rapidly (but, actually, looking back his sentences seem to have been depsertaly put together and a bit awkward...) and he grew in his size (heh, you can tell from the drawings). But the fact the Wilbur secertly remained a child is one of the things that makes the book more enjoyable, while reading the book one thinks that Wilbur did manage to grow into a full feldged uh.. pig, but when looking back and analyzing Wilbur's actions in relation to particular events, he came off as spoiled and needy.
     Archetypes can actually be quite flexible, it just depends on how you look at them and who's trying to connect what to which archetype.While reading the book the journey was, without a doubt, the journey into maturity, but, looking back, the story seems to have been more like a story about a task. The task was the mission to save Wilbur's life, but that seems to be a bit more specific to Charlotte. And then, the story could also be a bit of a quest due to it's fantasy-like feel and the initial task. So, by looking at the story through several lenses the story can morph into a different form for each character or each time in the book.
Charlotte's Web has characters who sway back and forth between many acrchetypes and force the archetypes to intertwine with one another in order to come up with a label worthy of a particular character's layers in personality. For instance, Tempelton is a 'shadow', a hero and a 'shapeshifter', with little motivation and an infrequent task. Fern is, at first, a hero who later seems to be a bit of a traitor. The books has 3 journeys and many characters, making it so that the archetypes in this book are rarely definite.