In the short story “St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell, the main character Claudette was successfully integrated into human society throughout the story. In each epigraph she would notice new changes in her personality. She struggled to figure out the ladylike ways she had to become to not let down her parents. But eventually she finds out how much she had to give to become a well behaved wolf girl. The girls at first were having fun by “tearing through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of starched underwear, and smashing light bulbs with their bare fists” and they marked their territory by “spraying exuberant yellow steams all over the bunks”.
In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a group of 15 girls were introduced to the home. In the story, only a few of those girls were focused on. This is because they wanted to show the range of development between the girls. Some never learned how to be civilized and human, and others did very well on learning how to be human. The story mainly focuses on Claudette, Mirabella, and Jeanette.
In the story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell there is a clear tone present through the whole reading. The tone in this story is the desire to be successful. The wolf girls are taken to St. Lucy’s so they can successfully be trained on how to be civilized. Their families have sent them away so they can make a better life for themselves. The parents of the girls were not accepted by the locals because of they are unable to act civilized.
In Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kanter the main theme is; it is acceptable to be different. Ten year old Cutuk talks to a village boy, “You're naluagmiu, huh? Elvis sneered. I dunno. Naluagmiu meant white person; the Eskimo dictionary didn't list it as a dirty word but everyone knew better”(51).
In Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk, there is a new girl named Betty and she is a horrible person. Her cruelty exceeds normal bullying; when she is close to dying, she tells a lie that ends up killing the town vagrant, Toby. Betty’s bullying built up over time, starting with small threats of bruises and a lie that led to the killing of an innocent man. It starts with Betty making threats to Annabelle about her family, and then Annabelle ends up with a bruise. She is so mean that she gets shipped to a different town because of how cruel she is and Annabelle says “She was described as incorrigible, a word I had to look up in the big dictionary at the school house”(Wolk 5).
As a parent, you wouldn’t send your child off with strangers, if you were lead to believe that those strangers could give your child a better life? In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell, children are taken from their home in the woods to a school which will teach them how to be civilized. The girls are raised by werewolf parents, but since the werewolf gene skips a generation, these children are not really werewolves. A group of nuns come to take them to a school to teach them to be human. In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls, Mirabella was a failure, slow, and destructive and was unable to adapt to her new life.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ROMANCE, ARKANSAS During the fall of 1850, a six-wagon, wagon train from Kentucky came upon a little valley with a good size creek. Their leader, Ben Pruitt, thought it looked like a good place to camp for the winter, and they did. By the time spring arrived they had named their settlement Kentucky Valley and called the creek, Cliffy Creek because of the cliffs in the creek and along its sides. One of those cliffs creates a rather large waterfall just a few hundred yards from the downtown area.
In Karen Russell’s short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, she develops the progression of the characters in relation to The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock. The characters, young girls raised as if they were wolves, are compared to the handbook with optimism that they will adapt to the host culture. The girls’ progression in the five set stages are critical to their development at St. Lucy’s. The author compares Claudette, the narrator, to the clear expectations the handbook sets for the girls’ development. Claudette’s actions align well with the five stages, but she has outbursts that remind her of her former self.
In Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, one learns about Mirabella, the youngest girl in the pack, yet the one who fights back the change the strongest. Throughout this text, readers can observe numerous examples of Mirabella's rebellion and her refusal to fall in line. Mirabella’s journey captures the exploration of resistance, autonomy, and the issues of societal categorization within the beautiful storytelling by Karen Russell. Within stages 1 and 2, one can see the challenges that Mirabella undergoes, standing strong for her true identity. To begin, readers see how she was prone to fight back and try to get away, even just at the beginning of their stay, “Then she ran.
How may one feel if everything known strips away from them? In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a short story by Karen Russell, the wolf pack goes to St. Lucy’s Home to become more civilized. As the journey continues, Claudette learns how to successfully leave her origins and adapt to human life. In the early stages of the story, Claudette faces many challenges whether it involves identity, family, or overstimulation.
In the story, St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, some wolf girls are taken to a school to be human. Some of the girls were able to change and graduate and some didn’t. In the story, Mirabella was slow, destructive, and failed to do her task. Have you ever met a slow person who didn’t try? Well, in this story Mirabella was the slow one.
In the book “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” There is an Lycanthropic culture handbook carried by the nuns that have five stages contain what should happen to the girls. In the story the packs parents send the girls off to the human world in hope that they would have a better life. All of the girls are having to learn how to adapt to there new life. One of the girls which is Claudette developed by the nuns handbook thought the five stages it the book. Claudette seems to follow the Lycanthropic culture shock which is the handbook used by the nuns.
Many families have many traditions, but one tradition that is common among all households is that they read fairy tales to their children right before they put them to sleep. They do this to fill their minds with good positive thoughts and leave them with something to think about. Religion dictates the characteristics of familiar fairy tales as religion provides a moral and ethical framework for having a good life, an ideal goal parents want their children to have. On the whole, fairy tales are constantly changed to adhere to cultural or social beliefs that are deemed important by diverse people in a community.
In Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” the wolves are perceived as dangerous and aggressive creatures posing threat to humans. In small villages, the children are given weapons just to protect themselves from the evil wolves. However, in Angela Carter’s story, a male can turn into a wolf. This undermines the binary oppositions for Carter’s story. Aaron Devor states in “Gender Roles Behaviors and Attitudes”, how the females are dependent and how the males are independent and much more aggressive.
Wolves, when in groups, are universally threatening and recurrently feared. This being known, they are often portrayed as an evil or opposing force. Although, on occasion, they have also been known to be referred to as “noble creatures who can teach us many things.” (http://www.wolfcountry.net/) But consequently, despite the popular interpretation of wolves and their characteristics, each story presents its own interpretation of their many characteristics.
