St. Lucy 's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a short story of a group of nuns who work to teach the pack of girls raised by wolves how to be civilized humans. In this short story written by Karen Russell, Claudette becomes truly conformed to society's standards of the correct way of living by the end of the 5th stage. One is able to see this through the trials Claudette goes through and what decision she chooses, whether it be the human way of living taught by the nuns or her wolf culture she grew up with. Despite the urge to hold onto her wolf upbringing, Claudette eventually takes on a fully human existence.

In the story, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," the author, Karen Russell, uses epigraphs throughout the stages of the story. An epigraph gives the reader a hint of what’s to come. This short story is about girls raised by wolves, who learn how to adapt to a new environment where they persevere. The epigraph in Stage 2 focuses on how hard it is to adjust to a new environment. It says that the girls must work even though they feel uncomfortable and confused. The relationship between the epigraph and the girls development in Stage 2 is accurate.

In Karen Russell’s short story, “St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, readers see Mirabella and her siblings go through boarding school. Mirabella and her siblings have a hard time adjusting to the school environment, but Mirabella struggles more to adapt. The nuns have a hard time with Mirabella as she ultimately refuses to adapt to the school. Through Mirabell’s ultimate resistance, she shows that she is stubborn, immovable, and animalistic.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a short story focusing mainly on the changes and influences the main characters experience while adapting to the principles imposed on them by the nuns of St. Lucy’s.  While transitioning from the werewolf lifestyle to humans, Claudette becomes challenged learning about the consequences of nonconformity through the success of Jeanette and the struggle of Maribella. In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen Russell uses word choice to build character development and interactions.

In Karen Russels' expert from the short story St. Lucy Home for Girls Raised by Wolfs, there are 3 girls sent to school to rehabilitate their barbaric behavior. Throughout the story, you will learn about all of Mirabella's experiences with the school. Mirabella does not adapt very well to being kept in a civilized or kempt environment. In stages 1 and 2, Mirabella is very elusive, aggressive, and confused about this new thing she has been put into. Claudette shows Mirabella's characteristics by stating “Our little sister had the quickest reflexes.

There is a sudden change in Sammy's attitude toward the girls throughout the story. At first, Sammy and his friend's he work

On the surface, the hero of John Updike's much-anthologized short story "A&P" does not seem like a hero on the level of an Odysseus or a Hercules. Sammy is a cashier at a local grocery store. However, when three girls wearing bathing suits enter the A&P, Sammy begins to experience a call to action. For the first time in his life, he takes a stand when he feels as if the pretty girls are being treated with a lack of respect. Sammy feels the first stirrings of rebellion within him, as he chafes against the constraints of his life. Campbell divides the three parts of the hero's quest into a circular journey of departure, initiation, and return. Over the course of "A&P" Sammy makes his 'departure' into the world of the hero.

To move one-step up can sometimes mean pushing someone else down. “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell conveys this adage through the story of girls who were initially raised by wolves for the first part of their lives. Through the voice of one specific character, Claudette, explains their transformations from once wolf like beings to human beings, having human characteristics. This process includes learning human emotions, behavioral skills and gaining human personalities. In turn, the desire to impress and to show ones superior that one is better than the last person sets in. At St. Lucy’s, in order to stay in the school, you must repress you wolf like instinct and gain the characteristics of humans. When one continuous resists, such as Mirabella, Claudette younger sister, in order to better oneself, the other girls see her as the weakest link and therefore she is easily cast out. In a sense, it is simply humanity selling each other out to better themselves.

Because the key to change is acceptance and the girls, including the main narrator, do not fully accept themselves in their new way of life, the transition from a wolf to a human life is never complete, leaving them in a place where they feel they do not belong. As readers, “the growing pains, the victory over culture shock, are so suggestive that we don't know where our sympathies lie. [We don’t know if we] should… admire civilized existence or primitive warfare” (Irving

Whether one would like to admit it or not, change is a difficult and not to mention uncomfortable experience which we all must endure at one point in our lives. A concept that everyone must understand is that change does not occur immediately, for it happens overtime. It is necessary for time to pass in order for a change to occur, be it days, weeks, months, or even years. The main character, who is also the narrator of “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, realizing that “things felt less foreign in the dark” (Russell 225), knows that she will be subject to change very soon. The author makes it evident to readers that the narrator is in a brand new environment as the story begins. This strange short story about girls raised by

Sammy, however, surprises us, just like the story does. His immediate infatuation with the girls and everything they represented (the youth he was quickly denying himself by being tied at such a young age to the very adult world of work) quickly brought him to realize that his life was still that of a young person. What he thinks is an act of bravery, which will certainly be awarded with the attentions of “Queenie”, turns out to be a solo act of personal assertion. Just when Sammie thinks his life is ending, it is truly just beginning.

When three young teenage girls enter the store wearing nothing but bathing suits, things begin to change for Sammy. Sammy takes notice of the actions of the girls; how they go against the normal “traffic flow” of the supermarket and break the social rules of society with their attire. It is these attributes that attract Sammy to them, as they represent freedom and escape from the life he finds himself in. When Lengel approaches them and reprimands them for what they are wearing, Sammy quits in the hopes of becoming the girls unsuspected hero.

Sammy faces the decision of staying at his job or leaving. His parents are friends with the manager of the store, Lengel. One day three girls walk into the store wearing nothing but bathing suits. Seeing it is a slow day, Sammy observes the girls as they go through the store and to his luck come to his check out station. Lengel then sees them at checkout and confronts the girls to tell them about the store’s policy that they should be dressed decently upon entering the store, “‘Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It’s our policy’” (Updike). This is where Sammy has his transitioning experience. Upon hearing this conversation, Sammy tries be a hero for the girls by making the decision to quit his job, “The girls, and who’d blame, them are in a hurry to get out, so I say ‘I quit’ to Lengel quick enough for them to hear,

The majority of the story takes place in 19-year-old Sammy’s mind. Here he describes, in detail, three girls in bathing

Upon first reading “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” it might seem like an imaginative fantasy and nothing else. The story focuses on the daughters of a pack of werewolves, and it takes place in a world where the werewolves and their daughters are nothing out of the ordinary. But upon closer examination, this is a story rooted in reality. This inventive tale parallels several real world phenomena. Karen Russell uses allegory in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” to objectify western society’s views of people outside of that society and of outsiders in general, and compare them to the views that people have of wild animals.