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”.
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.
In ”St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, Russell writes a short story regarding a group of girls, whose parents are werewolves. Their parent sent them to St. Lucy’s to be reformed into civilized humans and become functional members of society. Russell choses to divide the text into sections using an epigraph explaining what is expected in that stage, consisting of an excerpt from a fictitious guide, The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock. In Stage Two, Russell use the epigraph to describes how the wolf girls should behave and react in this stage. Some characters developed in this image and some stray from the description.
As a parent would you 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 parents, but since the werewolf gene skips a generation, these children are not really werewolves. A group of nuns come to take them to school to teach them to be human. In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Claudette was mean, sad and afraid, but was able to adapt to her new life. Claudette was sad, because she was taken from her parents and she couldn’t return, even after she graduated from St. Lucy’s.
To move one-step up can sometimes mean pushing someone else down. In Karen Russell’s story,“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” she conveys this adage through the story of girls who were raised by wolves for the first part of their lives. The story is told through the voice of one specific character, whose name is Claudette. She is the middle sister between Jeanette, the oldest, and Mirabella, the youngest.
In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a group of 15 girls were introduced to the home. In the story, only a few of those girls were focused on. This is because they wanted to show the range of development between the girls. Some never learned how to be civilized and human, and others did very well on learning how to be human. The story mainly focuses on Claudette, Mirabella, and Jeanette.
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.”
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.
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.
How may one feel if everything known strips away from them? In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a short story by Karen Russell, the wolf pack goes to St. Lucy’s Home to become more civilized. As the journey continues, Claudette learns how to successfully leave her origins and adapt to human life. In the early stages of the story, Claudette faces many challenges whether it involves identity, family, or overstimulation.
In Stage One the wolf pack first arrives at St. Lucy’s. Stage One tells the reader that the environment for the wolf-girls will be intriguing and exciting. They will
Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”,(2006) is a short story that tells the tale of children that were originally raised by their werewolf family, but are taken out of their natural environment to be socialized into "naturalized citizens of human society” (Russell 238). The story is narrated by the second of the three sisters, whose name is Claudette, as she experiences the different stages of becoming acclimated to human society. The narrator states “They had ostracized the local wolves by having human children.” (Russell 238). This illustrates that the children were sent to St. Lucy’s because their condition skipped a generation, alternating between humanity and wolfishness.
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.
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.
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
