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

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What is needed to adapt a girl who has been raised by wolves? According to Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” and “The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock”, trying to eradicate the lycanthropic origins of these individuals is a lengthy and harrowing process. In this text, Claudette is one of these individuals who is being rehabilitated. By the end of her stay at St. Lucy’s Home, she is not prepared to integrate into human society. While Claudette has an aptitude for languages and learning rapidly, she is not yet fully capable of living in a civilized society. Throughout the story, Claudette faces many struggles as she navigates through her new life at her new school. One of the things she struggles with …show more content…

For example, she says, “Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us. An abasing, belly-to-the-ground desire to please. As soon as we realized that someone higher up in the food chain was watching us, we wanted only to be pleasing in their sight.”(Russell 231). This quote shows the emotions that the pack feels when they understand that they have superiors, and how the pack will obey their superior’s commandments as the pack wants to please them. Russell uses “slavish-dog” and “abasing” to portray the emotions that the pack experiences throughout their transformation into civil citizens. To add to these accomplishments, Claudette thinks about Mirabella by stating, “She was still loping around on all fours (which the nuns had taught us to see looked unnatural and ridiculous—we could barely believe it now, the shame of it, that we used to locomote like that!)”(Russell 231). In this quote, Claudette shows her emotions toward her sister, and these emotions show that her mindset has progressed toward thinking more like a human. Russell uses these emotions to develop into another stage that helps Claudette accomplish even more human acts. All in all, Claudette has developed into a more ladylike individual. This claim is proved by the way that Russell portrays Claudette’s emotions, and how her actions are described with submissive

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