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. It took them two hours to pin her down and tag her: “HELLO, MY NAME …show more content…
But the truth is that by Stage 3 I wanted her gone.” In this part of the story, it is shown that Claudette starts to only care about herself and no longer cares about her sibling. leaving Mirabella to offend herself and struggle alone against the change. Overall, in stage 3, readers see how Mirabella’s journey develops deeper intricacies of societal control and individual autonomy. Throughout stage 4, Russell paints a very vivid image of the types of struggles that Mirabella faces. When Jeanette talks to Mirabella and Claudette, Claudette states, "She was the only one of us who would still talk to Mirabella; she was high enough in the rankings that she could afford to talk to the scruggliest wolf-girl.” Here one can see that Jeanette holds a high enough status in the house to be able to talk to Mirabella without any consequences on her progress. Within both of these quotes, Russell captures Mirabella's fierce resistance against the change, highlighting the universal human struggle to maintain a sense of identity in the face of life's forces. Ultimately, in