St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolf Summary

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”. The girl’s parents were

“After a time, your students realize that they must work to adjust to the new culture”. It is hard for Claudette to get used to everything. For example, trying to curl her tongue around her new false names, and keeping her shoes on and not biting on their new penny loafers. The pack would worry about Mirabella because she is the least successful of the pack “She’d go bounding around, gleefully spraying on their gilded statue of St Lucy, mad-scratching at the virulent fleas that survived all of their powders and baths.” Jeanette is the opposite of Mirabella because she was farther than any other girl in the pack “Jeanette was the first among us to apologize; to drink apple juice out of a sippy cup; to quit eyeballing the cleric’s jugular in a disconcerting fashion”. The nuns gave the girls a task which was to go out and feed the ducks in pairs of two, Claudette prayed for her to not get paired with Mirabella because “she was sure to eat the birds; Mirabella didn’t even try to curb her desire to kill things”(pg.243). The more lady like purebred girls were teaching the pack how to play checkers, dance and ride bikes. The purebred girls were taking it easy on the wolf girls when they were playing

The purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose, in order to give us an advantage”(pg.245). None of the girls were ready to dance the Sausalito with their brothers after six weeks of lessons except for Jeanette “They knew we weren’t ready to dance with the brothers; we weren’t even ready to talk to them”(pg.245). Claudette, Jeanette, and the rest of the pack were now understanding everything “Everything begins to make sense”(pg.247) – The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Cultural Shock. The girls brothers were now different from before when they were separated from each other “The brothers didn’t smell like our brothers any more. They smelled like pomade