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

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A human’s emotions can be their greatest ally or worst enemy. Positive emotions such as desire and satisfaction primarily assume the role of motivation within a person. However, negative emotions possess an even greater motivational impact due to their ability to drive a person beyond their personal limits. For example, shame is a devastating emotion that causes feelings of inadequacy and failure. As a result, people strive to prevent shame to themselves and others at all costs. However, through these efforts to avoid shame, people are often pushed outside of their comfort zones and accomplish difficult and seemingly unreachable goals. Through her story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, Karen Russell establishes a main theme of …show more content…

The main character Claudette expresses this idea through the quote: “...but who did we have to run back to? Only the curled black grimace of the mother. Only the father, holding his tawny head between his paws. Could we betray our parents by going back to them?” (Russell 232). Although the girls would love to go home, returning home would upset their parents and cause them to be ashamed of the girls. Therefore, the family shame motivates the girls to ignore their natural urge to return home to the forest in order to honor their parents’ wishes. In another example, Claudette acknowledges the shame that would come with failure: “But we knew we couldn’t return to the woods; not till we were civilized, not if we didn’t want to break the mother’s heart” (Russell 232). The girls’ wish to avoid shame causes them to continue to remain at St. Lucy’s and assimilate a culture that is not their own. Through this shame, the girls are pushed to immerse themselves entirely into human behaviors. Due to the presence of this potential shame, it is in the best interest of the girls and their parents for the girls to remain at the school and become human citizens. By creating this situation, Russell shows that even the potential of shame forces people to act against their own

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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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The old lady told her, “ ‘Little Bird, in the world to come, you will not be asked “Why were you not George?’ or ‘Why were you not Perkin’ but ‘Why were you not Catherine?’ ” (Cushman 17). Catherine didn’t fully understand what it meant at first, but the old woman’s words helped her later when it really mattered. When Shaggy Beard’s messengers came, Catherine ran to her Aunt Ethelfritha’s house in fear and desperation.

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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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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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Not great and not terrible, solidly middle of the pack” (Russell 232). This idea of Claudette being a good but imperfect character connects to her relation to the Handbook, as she mostly follows along with its expectations but occasionally lags

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From the first stage to last in, “St.Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, Claudette’s actions and ways of progression remain true and consistent to what the text of Lycanthropic Culture Shock discusses. Claudette follows the path of becoming fully human and comfortable being so, as the handbook describes through her advancing efforts towards personal change, her actions and reactions to situations, and what she ponders about through the stages. Claudette’s unequivocal adaptation to human society being in precise comparison to each of the five stages of Lycanthropic Culture Shock, ascertains the fact that Claudette’s development through each stage of the St.Lucy’s text is directly parallel to the five stages of Lycanthropic Culture Shock rendered from The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture

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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.

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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

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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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In addition, a study of Fredrickson (1998) also revealed that positive emotions are conceptually different compared to negative emotions. Negative emotions should not conceived as opposite of positive emotions because both function in a different way. Thereby, when experiencing positive emotions, negative feelings are almost not noticeable. Effects Diener et al.

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