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

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 Karen Russell 's short story, “St. Lucy 's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, she takes the character Claudette on a journey from a barbaric, careless wolf to a independent, determined girl. Claudette is the narrator of this short story. She and her pack start off in the woods, where they lived all their lives, the nuns in the home use the handbook to take them from the woods and teach them to be civilized humans. Claudette goes through this journey, trying her best, for if she cannot become human, she will have nowhere to go. The nuns split the girls learning process into 5 stages, each one filled with new things. The handbook shows the expectations of the girls and what should be in store for them. Russell uses this handbook to develop Claudette 's character throughout the story. Claudette changes throughout each stage, learning and shaping her new identity in each one.

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. Short excerpts from this text that

There are many things that influence how one portrays or performs race. Race is something that cannot be easily, psychically changed, but it is such an important part of one’s identity and can be manipulated based on ever changing surrounding forces. People perform race even within their specified “race” because of the influences of other races around themselves.

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.

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.

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

Jeannette’s mother believed that if the pets became reliant on humans, they would not be able to survive out in the wild. She also applied the theory to children in general; “Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us.

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.

Lucy stands in many ways in contrast to Mina’s character as their moral views and ways of life are distant. She has no occupation and is in no way seeking any form of education. Due to this fact she resembles at first initially in no case the modern New Women, as these sought for independence and education. Her personality can be described as girly, lovely and ‘sweetly innocent’, a seeming sample of Victorian perfection. Lucy is highly beheld for her beauty as her appearance is that of a luminous beauty with fair hair, that is described as “sunny ripples” , and pure bright eyes.

They think they can bend the rules and do what they think is necessary. Jeannette is exposed to these understandings, making her the person she grew up to be. Jeanette demonstrates how she struggles with her family throughout numerous portions of the novel: “The Desert,” “Welch,” New York.” These struggles developed and defined who she came to be.

Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, author of the article, “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum”, conducted an experiment that followed one student over a twenty-one month period, through three separate college classes to record his behavioral changes in response to each of the class’s differences in their writing expectations. The purpose was to provide both student and professor a better understanding of the difficulties a student faces while adjusting to the different social and academic settings of each class.

Claudette tried her best to adapt to the humans culture and all the feral children had spent months learning to assimilate into human culture. However, despite her perseverance through all these challenges, some of the wolf in them still remained. This would later cause Claudette to stand out in both societies due to the wolf characteristics that still remained (thus not fitting in with the human societies) and the human characteristics that she learned (thus not fitting in the the werewolf societies). Feral diction also appeared in the story when Claudette attempted to dance to sausalito with Kyle. When she stepped onto the dance floor, the panicked and the feral part of her returned; Russell writes, “I threw back my head, a howl clawing its way up my throat” (250).

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.

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.