ipl-logo

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

785 Words4 Pages

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. An epigraph before each stage is included to help with the organization and structure of the story. It also includes things rehabilitators should expect from the students and is taken from the Jesuit handbook. In Stage 2, the girls realize that adapting to the host human culture will not be an easy task. They will have to work to adapt and will struggle in the process. They will have strong feelings of culture shock and become agitated. They may reminisce about their past wolf life and daydream. In a wolf pack, the alpha is the leader of the pack. The alpha would be in control and the rest of the pack would follow. That was Jeanette. In Stage 2, Jeanette was the furthest developed and was envied by the pack. Russell writes, “The pack hated Jeanette. She was the most successful of us, the one furthest removed from her origins” (232). Jeanette realized early on she was going to have to work towards her goal of achieving human identity and didn’t mind being at the top. Jeanette adapted quickly and had learned many human-like abilities. Jeanette “..could even

Show More
Related

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

    385 Words  | 2 Pages

    In stage two of Karen Russell’s story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, the epigraph informs us that the girls will be working very hard and will experience stress which will cause emotional distress and periods of unhappiness. As well as that they must “..must work hard to adjust to the new culture”. The pack of girls felt as if they weren’t in their place or where they belonged. They didn’t find their purpose yet. The girls during this stage will experience feelings of being “isolated..,depressed, or generally uncomfortable” as they begin to adjust to their new environment.

    Read More

  • St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Short Story

    1067 Words  | 5 Pages

    They used to live together in the woods and they miss being a part of the family that breaks apart when they start to become human. The longing for family binds the wolf girls closer together, as in their minds they have nobody left except themselves to rely on after their parents abandon them. Mirabella refuses to become human as she clenches her hands with “her fists blue-white from strain” (Russell 241). Blue

    Read More

  • Tell The Wolves Im Home Analysis

    1361 Words  | 6 Pages

    Finally, he or she accepts those values and they are accepted by the society, ending the dissatisfaction.” Tell The Wolves I’m Home takes place in New York during the years 1986 and 1987. During this time, AIDS was a disease that only homosexuals had and transmitted. There was no cure, and those who had AIDS died. In the following quotation, the reader see a classmate asking about Finn’s illness.

    Read More

  • St. Lucy's Home For Girls Character Analysis

    922 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Karen Russell's short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, a pack of wolf-girls are sent to a church to transform them into human-girls. As they journey through their transformation there is a guide called, The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock that helps the nuns running St. Lucy’s. The book describes the transformation in stages to help determine the girls’ place as a human. Claudette, the narrator, arrives at St. Lucy’s with her pack to begin their transformation. She struggles through most of the stages, but succeeds in only a couple of them.

    Read More

  • Lycanthropic Culture Shock Character Analysis

    1455 Words  | 6 Pages

    Analyze Claudette’s development in relation to the five stages of Lycanthropic Culture Shock. “St.Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, the short story written by Karen Russell, concenters on the narrator and primary character, Claudette who lived as though she was a wolf for the majority of her life. Once being sent to St.Lucy’s along with the rest of her pack, Claudette began to carve a new path for herself where she would become a well-rounded, decent human. The text, The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock that the nuns at the home follow as a guideline through the process of helping the girls adapt to the human culture, assumes how the pack, including Claudette, develop, act, and feel under the circumstances they state

    Read More

  • Permissive Parenting Styles In The Glass Castle

    251 Words  | 2 Pages

    Rex believes that Jeanette was able to handle herself and

    Read More

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

    721 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • St. Lucy's Home Raised By Wolf Analysis

    504 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Theme Of Maturity In The Glass Castle

    443 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jeanette was raised by devil-may-care parents who believed she could manage on her own enough to be cooking for herself each night at the age of three, which eventually leads to her getting seriously burned. Events such as these, careless and reckless parenting as it may have been, made Jeanette “grow up” ten times faster than the normal girl her age, albeit for all the wrong reasons. For example, “It was easy… It wasn’t like there was some complicated recipe that you had to be old enough to follow. … Mom says I’m mature for my age, and she lets me cook a lot.”

    Read More

  • Feral Diction In St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolf

    462 Words  | 2 Pages

    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).

    Read More

  • Struggle Of Life Exposed In Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle

    758 Words  | 4 Pages

    She struggled with how the society and her family shaped who she was. She was exposed to her family first which made her behave the way she did under her family’s house. Jeanette struggled with her family by taking care of the house, beings told bending the rules is okay and the acceptance of her Mom’s and Dad’s homelessness. When Jeannette left her family and went to live in New York, she becomes an individual. She fends for herself and gets her life together.

    Read More

  • Summary Of St Lucy's Home For Girls

    1429 Words  | 6 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Girl Characters In Lord Of The Flies Essay

    833 Words  | 4 Pages

    The novel Lord of the Flies is about a group of schoolboys who are stranded on an unknown island and their journey of how they try to survive, but fail. The story lacks any real female character. But why? There no complete answer to this question, but I think it is because in the story the boys learn the a few lessons such as: responsibility, maturity, and respect. "The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away" The boys had challenges and unfortunately not everyone survived.

    Read More

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

    989 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Summary Of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves

    1580 Words  | 7 Pages

    In Stage One, Claudette exceeds the standards the handbook sets. The handbook says that the girls will experience new things, full of curiosity and wonder of what is to come (225). Claudette exceeds this description, along with most other members of the pack. Throughout Stage One, each member of the pack has great curiosity of their surroundings, leaving a destruct wake in their path. The girls “tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls’ starched underwear, [and smashed] light bulbs with [their] bare fists” (225).

    Read More

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

Open Document