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.
Ashlynn Turner ENG 9H Block 2 9/30/22 U1 Summative Paragraph The short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell presents the concept that conformity forced onto groups results in them forfeiting their capability to function as a group. In this story, Russell follows the story of Claudette, a girl taken away from everything she knows to study a seemingly better culture. In this story, Claudette looked back on her past at St. Lucy’s school for girls raised by wolves.
In both instances in “St. Lucy’s” and the Native American Indians, they had no other option but to be repressed by the Early Americans. Such as the early American nation thought it was necessary for the assimilation of the American Indians. Likewise the assimilation of the American Indians the girls in “St. Lucy’s” were forced to blend in and forget their old way of life to learn to act like a human. For the purpose of assimilation, some American Indian children were kidnapped and taken to boarding schools to learn how to be more like the early Americans and forced to forget their old way of life. With this in mind; “St. Lucy’s” children weren’t really kidnapped, but more convinced that this is what there wolf parents wanted from them and
In the story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell, the girls go through a lot of changes. In the story the girls are experience changes, because everything is new to them, and they are wanting to explore the new place. Another change they are experiencing is, they are rejecting their host culture. The final change the girls are experiencing is that they are finding they are adapting to the new culture, so they become fully bilingual.
Arbol que chueco nace chueco se queda. [The tree that grows twisted will never fix its ways]. Many people would agree that the bad characters that everyone grows to love and hate are pure evil on the inside and out. In literature these are the characters that might be flat. Of course not all characters are simple.
In Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.”, a story is told about a group of girls raised by werewolves, but are taken out of their natural environment to be socialized into "naturalized citizens of human society. " While this story is fictional and interesting most readers will not comprehend that the whole story is one big metaphor. It’s a metaphor about growing up and having experiences. The story reveals that the more one becomes socialized the more they lose sight of their human connection.
When we speak of Autobiography, we mean life writing which is considered to be a way to write and tell our own struggles and hardships in our lives. As an example of Autobiography, Lucy Grealy’s “Autobiography of a face” as the protagonist in her book, she is relatable to many Greek Mythical creatures, because of her life experiences, life events and the difficulties she faced. Lucy was born in Dublin, Ireland, her family moved to United States, to New York. She was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 9, which lead to the removal of her jawbone. Her childhood was not the typical childhood you would see in our daily life, it was harsh ,tough, full of insults, and taunts followed by the piercing stares of everyone around her, because of how she looked.
In 1994, Lucy Grealy wrote a memoir called Autobiography of a Face. It is about her childhood struggles dealing with cancer in her jaw that haunted her most of her entire life. Lucy Grealy is a tomboy but was not so great at organized sports. She suffered a minor injury while playing dodgeball, it became the first sign that something could be wrong with her. Grealy was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ewing Sarcoma at age nine.
No matter one’s career choice, family life, ethnicity, or culture, finding and owning one’s personal identity is a persistent struggle that can last an entire lifetime. One is surrounded by media and messages feigning “the perfect life” which begin to consume one’s thoughts with “what if’s” or “if only’s”. Lucy Grealy struggles with defining her self-image in her autobiography, Autobiography of a Face. Throughout Grealy’s accounts of her battle with cancer, bullies, and her self-esteem, readers get a raw, painful, yet incredibly relatable look into the elements that can contribute to self-image. In writing Autobiography of a Face, Grealy leaves readers with a chilling lesson: only readers themselves, not peers or the media or society, can choose how to define their lives.
A person's identity, or whom they think they are, can be tied to family, work, school, hobbies, race, religion, and more. None of how people construct identity has more to do with their sense of place than identity. In an excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, the narrator finds herself in a strange new place that challenges her identity. The author uses imagery, contrasting details, and tone to reveal the narrator's inner turmoil and sense of freedom. This passage uses metaphors to illustrate the narrator's situation and help the reader identify with the narrator.
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.
Slowly through the chapters Lucy’s tempting sexuality is more lightly brought up. In one of her may letters to Mina, Lucy tells her about the three proposal she got that day and asks her why they cannot:” […] let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble.” Through her liberal dealing with sexuality, Lucy is crossing mentally boundaries set up by the social convention of society as it was immoral and forbidden for women in
In the short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” author Karen Russell develops the narrator, Claudette, through the use of five “stages” to show her progression from her wolf identity to the human culture. This short story follows a group of girls raised by wolf parents through their journey at St. Lucy’s, which is a rehabilitation center for human children raised by wolf parents. Throughout their time at St. Lucy’s, the girls are expected to experience five distinct stages as they adapt. Each of these stages is described by a fictional text entitled The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock. The nuns at St. Lucy’s use it as a guide for teaching their students.
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.
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.
