“St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves” is a short story written by Karen Russell. This story is about a pack of children going to St. Lucy’s home, where they need to adapt and get past the lycanthropic culture shock to become a citizen of the human society. In the story Claudette, the main character, has been fully conformed to the human ways of life. This is true because in the text there are many implications of her being fully conformed to the human world. While Claudette does conform to the foreign aspects of St. Lucy’s home, she has many struggles along the way. For example, at the beginning she “clamped down on her ankle, straining to close my jaws around the woolly XXL sock.”(Page 226). With this quote a conclusion can be made that she shows her wolf reactions taking over her at …show more content…
Another prime example of this is “Ohhkaaythankyou,” I said. (It took me a long time to say anything; first I had to translate it in my head from the Wolf.)”(Page 234). By this a conclusion can be made that about halfway through her stay she still has not become fully bilingual. She will even start to lose her wolf language, which will causes her to struggle when she is transferring between the wolf and human society. She also struggles which things such as keeping her shoes on her feet as seen here “ Mouth shut—shoes on feet! Mouth shut—shoes on feet! “Mouthshutmouthshut.”(Page 238). This shows primitive instinct showing while she is trying to stay kempt. She does this many times in her transformation period between the human ways and her origins because she is trying to shove out her old primitive ways. While she did struggle during her transformation, she also had many accomplishments. First off she learned very quickly how to bipedal which is modern day human walking, this happens in this quote “Almost everybody was fully bipedal.”(Page 230). She started to bi pedal very quickly which helped her keep up and look normal
There are many literary devices used across stories. Color imagery is one of these literary devices that is used when colors give objects a symbolic meaning. In the short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell, girls who have been raised as wolves are thrust into the unknown as they are forced to adapt to human society. Their childhood was spent living with wolves, however they are taken in by nuns of St. Lucy’s who attempt to assimilate them into the human world through different phases. Throughout the story, color imagery is used to emphasize the key theme of unity, establish the conflicted tone, and metaphorically develop Claudette’s character.
Families that found girls a burden upon their shoulders, who found feeding cowbirds better than feeding them, who only raise them to one day sell them off to an unknown man. These are the values, traditions, and cultures that Kingston brings forth with her stories, these are the reasons, one realizes, that make all these women voiceless. Not only does she bring to attention how many women and girls are voiceless but also why they are that
Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, the girls have their identity stripped away from them. While Miura chooses to leave behind her “real self,” the way she performs in Japan, in order to please the audience, the girls of St. Lucy’s do not have a choice; if they want to succeed, they will be forced to change their performance of race. In both cases, whether intentional or unintentional, the race that surrounds them uses their majority to dominate the minority race. In Miura’s situation, she understands the need to perform differently for different audiences. However, the girls of St. Lucy’s have only known the “wolf way” of life and must change for “survival” purposes.
In Karen Russell's short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, a pack of wolf-girls are sent to a church to transform them into human-girls. As they journey through their transformation there is a guide called, The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock that helps the nuns running St. Lucy’s. The book describes the transformation in stages to help determine the girls’ place as a human. Claudette, the narrator, arrives at St. Lucy’s with her pack to begin their transformation. She struggles through most of the stages, but succeeds in only a couple of them.
Analyze Claudette’s development in relation to the five stages of Lycanthropic Culture Shock. “St.Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, the short story written by Karen Russell, concenters on the narrator and primary character, Claudette who lived as though she was a wolf for the majority of her life. Once being sent to St.Lucy’s along with the rest of her pack, Claudette began to carve a new path for herself where she would become a well-rounded, decent human. The text, The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock that the nuns at the home follow as a guideline through the process of helping the girls adapt to the human culture, assumes how the pack, including Claudette, develop, act, and feel under the circumstances they state
In “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, Claudette, Mirabella, and Jeanette is taken to a foreign place to adapt to human nature. They are taken through the process of 5 stages of becoming human. Claudette, the speaker of the story, is stuck between two faces, the human and the wolf face. While Claudette is in between these two worlds, she has fully conformed from wolf to human. She has completed the transformation from wolf to human because her own mother doesn 't recognize her, trying to make herself seem more like human, and not even caring about her own fellow wolf mates anymore.
Karen Russel’s narrator, Claudette in the short story “St. Lucy’s home for girls raised by wolves” has a guilty hope that she fails to adapt to her new human culture and exhibits her instinctive wolve traits showing that Claudette has not successfully adapted to the human culture. Claudette wishes to adapt to the human culture but has a difficult time accepting it. The St. Lucy’s home for girls raised by wolves is for girls to learn the human culture. The faster the girls go through the stages, the faster they have adapted and accepted their new culture and can be released. While Claudette acts as if the human culture is growing on her
They may reminisce about their past wolf life and daydream. In a wolf pack, the alpha is the leader of the pack. The alpha would be in control and the rest of the pack would follow. That was Jeanette.
Lucy stands in many ways in contrast to Mina’s character as their moral views and ways of life are distant. She has no occupation and is in no way seeking any form of education. Due to this fact she resembles at first initially in no case the modern New Women, as these sought for independence and education. Her personality can be described as girly, lovely and ‘sweetly innocent’, a seeming sample of Victorian perfection. Lucy is highly beheld for her beauty as her appearance is that of a luminous beauty with fair hair, that is described as “sunny ripples” , and pure bright eyes.
In the story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, the author, Karen Russell, uses feral diction to establish that although people strive for perfectionism in their lives, people cannot become someone or something that they are not, thus causing a loss of identity. Russell uses feral diction in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” to prove that people cannot change who the are. For example, Kyle tried to talk to Claudette, but just succeeded in annoying her instead. Claudette immediately reacted and, according to the story, “I narrowed my eyes at Kyle and flattened my ears, something I hadn’t done for months” (249).
In this essay, I will be talking about all the hardships that Lyddie had to push through and how bad their lives were back then. Many young girls, working as young as ten, had many harsh conditions already. Starting in chapter 3, which was the cutler's tavern, Lyddie got her first job. Even in the beginning, you could tell it was going to be a harsh time for the rude comments given by the owner. For example, “ “Go along” the woman was saying.
In the short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” author Karen Russell develops the narrator, Claudette, through the use of five “stages” to show her progression from her wolf identity to the human culture. This short story follows a group of girls raised by wolf parents through their journey at St. Lucy’s, which is a rehabilitation center for human children raised by wolf parents. Throughout their time at St. Lucy’s, the girls are expected to experience five distinct stages as they adapt. Each of these stages is described by a fictional text entitled The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock. The nuns at St. Lucy’s use it as a guide for teaching their students.
In the short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” written by Karen Russell, a pack of wolf girls leave their home in the woods for St. Lucy’s in order to be able to live in human society. Within the story, Russell has included epigraphs before each stage from The Jesuit Handbook for Lycanthropic Culture Shock. This handbook was for the nuns at St. Lucy’s to help guide their students. Karen Russell included the epigraphs, short quotations at the beginning of a chapter intended to suggest a theme, from the handbook to help the reader understand what the characters might be feeling or how they will act in a certain stage. In Stage One, the epigraph closely relates to the characters’ development, yet doesn’t consider that the girls could be fearful in their new home due to interactions with the nuns.
This shows that the girls still possess their animal instinct, but are overpowered with the strong sense of curiosity to the life that the humans live. Claudette even mentions that they had forgotten “the barked cautions of [their] mothers
“Empirical studies also show that some immigrant parents sometimes fail to implement effective bilingual education because they firstly, are unable to keep speaking continuously at home out of habits when living in a foreign country; secondly, they fail to push hard enough for education; and thirdly, they try to help but do not know how” (Fan-Wei 115). Often times when children start going to a new school and make new friends, they get used to talking in the language spoken at school (their non-native language). Therefore, when a student starts learning a new language, they tend to practice it as much as possible and start talking to everyone they know in the new language. This causes the child to not speak enough of their mother tongue and eventually forget how to read and write it. On the other hand, parents may fail to make the effort to teach the child their native language because they are so focused on having their child and themselves excel at the new language.