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St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Analysis

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What is needed to adapt a girl who has been raised by wolves? According to Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” and “The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock”, trying to eradicate the lycanthropic origins of these individuals is a lengthy and harrowing process. In this text, Claudette is one of these individuals who is being rehabilitated. By the end of her stay at St. Lucy’s Home, she is not prepared to integrate into human society. While Claudette has an aptitude for languages and learning rapidly, she is not yet fully capable of living in a civilized society. Throughout the story, Claudette faces many struggles as she navigates through her new life at her new school. One of the things she struggles with …show more content…

For example, she says, “Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us. An abasing, belly-to-the-ground desire to please. As soon as we realized that someone higher up in the food chain was watching us, we wanted only to be pleasing in their sight.”(Russell 231). This quote shows the emotions that the pack feels when they understand that they have superiors, and how the pack will obey their superior’s commandments as the pack wants to please them. Russell uses “slavish-dog” and “abasing” to portray the emotions that the pack experiences throughout their transformation into civil citizens. To add to these accomplishments, Claudette thinks about Mirabella by stating, “She was still loping around on all fours (which the nuns had taught us to see looked unnatural and ridiculous—we could barely believe it now, the shame of it, that we used to locomote like that!)”(Russell 231). In this quote, Claudette shows her emotions toward her sister, and these emotions show that her mindset has progressed toward thinking more like a human. Russell uses these emotions to develop into another stage that helps Claudette accomplish even more human acts. All in all, Claudette has developed into a more ladylike individual. This claim is proved by the way that Russell portrays Claudette’s emotions, and how her actions are described with submissive

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St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Summary

493 Words | 2 Pages

According to the story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”by Karen Russell, the girls parents send them to St. Lucy’s in order for them to become naturalized humans of society. Throughout the stages, they master human advancement while encountering culture shock of human society. Claudette integrates into human culture successfully at the end of the story. In my opinion, I believe that she has become a naturalized citizen. Claudette has successfully consolidated into human society.

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St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Analysis

586 Words | 3 Pages

'You have ruined it!' my sisters panted, circling around us, eager to close ranks. ' Mirabella has ruined it!' Every girl was wild-eyed and itching under her polka dots, punch froth dribbling down her chin. The pack had been waiting for this moment for some time.

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Summary Of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolf

441 Words | 2 Pages

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.

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St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Summary

461 Words | 2 Pages

In the story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell, the girls go through a lot of changes. In the story the girls are experience changes, because everything is new to them, and they are wanting to explore the new place. Another change they are experiencing is, they are rejecting their host culture. The final change the girls are experiencing is that they are finding they are adapting to the new culture, so they become fully bilingual.

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St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Analysis

989 Words | 4 Pages

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.

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St Lucy's Home For Girls Possessed By Wolves Analysis

674 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout life, evolution, or change, becomes the center of each day as people overcome many different obstacles. Literature, such as in Thomas Hardy’s poem, “The Ruined Maid” and Karen Russell’s, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” often upholds the same idea about change. In Hardy’s poem, two country girls simply conversate about the times they were apart to emphasize how ‘Melia changed in the city, yet she kept her same individuality. On the other hand, Russell displays through her writing more obvious change as girls were trained by undergoing five different stages as a way to teach them how to conform to new environments while remembering who they were at the beginning. Both authors illustrate the importance of change while hanging on to one’s roots, but Hardy uses a naive tone to create tension between the two girls while Russell uses an abundance of symbolism to represent each stage of change.

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St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Analysis

532 Words | 3 Pages

For starters, “I narrowed my eyes at Kyle and flattened my ears, something I hadn’t done for months. Kyle looked panicked” (Russell 243). This example shows that Claudette cannot help but to be aggressive toward others when she is panicked. Furthermore, she does not understand how to interact with others, proving that her time at St. Lucy’s has failed to eradicate her lycanthropic tendencies. Another jarring example is when Claudette explains that, “All of a sudden the only thing my body could remember how to do was pump and pump.

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St. Lucy's Home For Girls Character Analysis

922 Words | 4 Pages

In this stage she is expected to feel comfortable in the human culture, and everything in the human culture will start to make sense (Russell 240). Claudette does not match the expectation in this stage due to the Sausalito dance. When she got to the dance, she met Kyle, her brother. Their conversations were very awkward, she, “narrowed my eyes at Kyle and flattened [her] ears, something [she] hadn’t done for months” (Russell 242 and 243) because she had changed into a human. She naturally resorted to her wolf like instincts to flatten her ears when she was in this awkward conversation with Kyle, meaning she has not met the expectation of the stage.

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St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Short Story

1067 Words | 5 Pages

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.

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Is The Theme Of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves

1454 Words | 6 Pages

Kelli Raque Ms. Stout Creative Writing 26 April, 2023 TW In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell the reader follows a collection of short stories told by many perspectives. From the four that the class read there are many literary devices used, one that really stuck out was how she decided to tell the stories and who told them. Russell uses point of view effectively throughout a lot of her stories, by making the narrator a younger kid telling the story it helps provide to the magical realism in the book and also lets the readers have different interpretations of the story and debate if it's all real magic or just the magic of childhood. In the short story Haunting Olivia the story is told by a young boy named Timothy

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What Is The Theme Of St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolf

664 Words | 3 Pages

The girls showed obvious signs of wanting to progress and making improvements in their behavior. This proves that they could transition into human life with enough assistance and preparation. While the signs of wanting to transition into human society are evidently displayed by the girls there was one outlier, that being mirabelle. Mirabelle did not want to learn how to flourish in a human sense. Despite the success of all the other girls she did not

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1455 Words | 6 Pages

This proves itself by how Claudette took on a large dose of self-confidence and independence. At the installation of the fourth section, Claudette ignored Jeanette’s need for help and continued with what she needed to accomplish for herself to be successful at the time. Claudette’s confidence and independence shows her understanding of situations and comfort in her new life. Further along in the fourth stage, when the Debutante Ball began, Claudette had her hair swept “back into high, bouffant hairstyles” and was “wearing a white organdy dress with orange polka dots” while eating fancy hors d’œuvres (Russell 242). This display of comportement further shows her confidence and acclimation to the human culture through her ability to stand the high class situation.

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Summary Of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves

1580 Words | 7 Pages

In Stage One, Claudette exceeds the standards the handbook sets. The handbook says that the girls will experience new things, full of curiosity and wonder of what is to come (225). Claudette exceeds this description, along with most other members of the pack. Throughout Stage One, each member of the pack has great curiosity of their surroundings, leaving a destruct wake in their path. The girls “tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls’ starched underwear, [and smashed] light bulbs with [their] bare fists” (225).

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St. Lucy's Home Raised By Wolf Analysis

504 Words | 3 Pages

and she acts like a good student it is only because of the school’s expectations. Claudette wants to return back to her wolf culture so she pretends to have

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St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Analysis

721 Words | 3 Pages

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.

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