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

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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. Therefore, sending the girls away was an offer the parents could not pass up. However, most of the girls seem to do very well at this school while others seem to not do so well. The story is being told through Claudette who the middle aged sister. Claudette watches her sisters’ struggle …show more content…

Lucy’s they realize they have no choice but to shape up and learn how to be civilized. Claudette watches herself proceed through the stages, and she watches her younger sister Mirabella struggle the most. Through the whole story the tone of desire is seen. In the text it says “…students may experience a strong sense of dislocation.” (Russell, 231) The girls feeling uncomfortable and confused was the mood in the beginning of the short story. In the beginning they run wild and destroy the rooms, and dig holes out on the grounds of St. Lucy’s. They soon realize what they are doing is not appropriate anymore, and that they have no choice but to follow what the Sisters’ tell them to do. As they progress through the five stages they begin to question why they acted like they did previously, and how much better their new civilized culture is. The wolf girls begin to try and impress the Sisters and show them how they can be civilized, and that they can change unlike Mirabella. Claudette watches Jeanette succeed the best out of everyone, and hates her for doing so well so fast after arriving at their new home. Later in the story Claudette tries to be better than Jeanette when she practices her dancing late at night. Claudette desires to be the best and show that she can change her ways, and function properly like the St. Lucy’s Sisters want them …show more content…

She watches her younger sister struggle to adapt to the new changes and lifestyle. The group of girls begin to ostracize their youngest sister because they do not want to fail like her too. By watching their sister be unsuccessful it makes them want to succeed that much more. Jeanette, the oldest sister, does well right from the start. She is obviously the favorite, but she also takes the whole process seriously. The other sisters hate Jeanette because she does so well with changing who she is, and how she was raised.Another big motivation for the girls is because they do not know what happens if they do not make it successfully through all five stages to civilization. The unknown scares all of the girls, and drives them to do better. This motivation is seen in all of the fifteen sisters. At the end of the story when Mirabella is no longer at St. Lucy’s the girls know they probably will never see their sister again, and this makes them sad, but also relieved at the same time they will not have to deal with their failing sister

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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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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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Karen Russell’s short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, is about a pack of wolf-like girls who go to St. Lucy’s to learn how to adapt to a human life. The stages of adapting shows the character 's development and their traits throughout the story. There are many struggles as they adapt to human life, and epigraphs from The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock informs the nuns on what will occur at a certain point in time. Sometimes the epigraphs aren’t entirely accurate. However, Stage Two’s epigraph is quite accurate with its description to Claudette.

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in the story ”St. Lucy 's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell, Claudette undergoes a difficult and overstimulating experience trying to be retaught so she can join the human world. It is clear that Claudette has most definitely adapted to the human world and it’s civilized background. The pack would have been ostracized by both the wolfs and the humans if not for her parents wanting better for them. In the beginning, Claudette was very good at reading the foreign language,”But I had an ear for languages, and I could read before I could adequately wash myself.

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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).

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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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The oldest of the girls, Jeanette, is one of the first to learn almost everything. She was the “first among us to apologize,” and to do many more things. Jeanette is the first to start acting very human, unlike the others. She learned quickly, and made more of an effort than most of the other girls. She was the first girl to learn

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People who endure dislocation feel out of place and have many mixed emotions. Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” tells the story of a group of girls who suffer from lycanthropy including Jeanette, Claudette, and Mirabella. The “pack” of girls go through many stages to rehabilitate to their human identity. The girls experience culture shock and have to work as they progress through the stage.

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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

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Jeanette wanted to escape Welch because of her unstable lifestyle, but she had fully given up on her parents. As she created her plan to escape, she said: “I had been counting on Mom and Dad to get us out, but I now knew I had to do it on my own” (Walls 221). She had finally realized that she could not rely on

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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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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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