The Lion and the Unicorn

Aranea cavatica (A. ca-vat i-ca).—This spider is dirty white in colour with grayish markings. The abdomen is clothed with numerous whitish or gray hairs, which give it in life a grayish appearance; this is not so marked in alcoholic specimens. The folium is often distinct (Fig. 487); but is usually not so well-marked as in the two preceding species, and is sometimes indistinct. On the ventral side of the abdomen there is a broad black band extending from the epigastric furrow to the spinnerets; the basal half of this band is bordered by two curved yellow lines; and near the middle of its length there is a pair of yellow spots (Fig. 488). . . .

Although the scape of the epigynum (Fig. 489) is elongate, it is less than twice as long as its width at the base.

The males before me are remarkable for their size, being about as large as the females.

This species, as its specific name indicates, prefers shady situations. Emerton states that it lives in great numbers about houses and barns in northern New England. I have found it in a tunnel at Ithaca, and on the sides of cliffs in a ravine. Its webs are sometimes very large.

(Comstock 484; 486)

This is, to my eyes, the exemplary description E. B. White had read of Aranea cavatica (today designated Araneus cavaticus [ACW 182]) ¹ in preparation for the creation of Charlotte.

White would have gone on to note the picture of the spider’s sexual organ (epigynum), and to learn that his arachnid (not insect, as some call her) companion in Maine lived also in Ithaca, new York, the site of White’s own happy college years at Cornell.

My Annotated “Charlotte’s Web” begins with a fitting epigraph from the sage Samuel Johnson, who claimed that, in editing Shakespeare, he “could have written longer notes, for the art of writing notes is not of difficult attainment” (quoted xv). When writing of the world of arthropods, as in writing of Shakespeare, the fascination of the subject makes the task [End Page 223] of editorial selection difficult and, at times, painful. For Charlotte’s Web, White consulted primarily two volumes on the subject of spiders. The writing in those volumes, the descriptions, accounts, and occasional speculations, is so precise, so engaging, sometimes so amusing and poetical, and at all times, respectful of their “miraculous” subject, that I originally quoted from them at much greater length than is evident now. In some measure, my publisher, HarperCollins, humored me, permitting considerable quotation of spider lore from White’s sources. At the same time, I was tactfully reminded that perhaps not every reader would find the eight-legged creatures as fetching as did I.

When the opportunity presented itself, courtesy of The Lion and the Unicorn, to reinstate some of the excised spider passages, to put these sources officially on record, as it were, I gratefully seized it. Presumably, we agree on the excellence of Charlotte’s Web, and thus want to know what went into the book’s creation. The scientific excerpts gathered below entertained, informed, and inspired E. B. White. They are a part of the history of his novel.

Charlotte’s Web was not the first literary occasion on which White artistically featured a spider. Twenty years earlier, shortly after his marriage to Katharine, White wrote a letter to his young wife that contained the following poem, ending with a metaphor functioning quite like the “twin compasses” of John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”:

November 30, 1929

NATURAL HISTORY

The spider, dropping down from twig, Unwinds a thread of his devising; A thin, premeditated rig To use in rising.

And all the journey down through space In cool descent, and loyal-hearted, He builds a ladder to the place From which he started.

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, In spider’s web a truth discerning, Attach one silken strand to you For my returning.

(Poems and Sketches 72)

Notwithstanding this early spider in White’s oeuvre, spiders did not play the same critical role in his subconscious as did rodents—rats...