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

“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell is a story about a group of girls that suffer from lycanthropic culture shock. This causes the girls to believe they are wolves because they are raised by wolves. The girls are sent to a school, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls, where nuns will teach the group of girls how to be human. They would be taught human traits, the human culture, and human habits in an attempt to eradicate any wolf culture in them. Out of the first three stages of the shift from wolf to human, the third stage shows a massive amount of character development in the girls. In the first two stages, the group of girls are just beginning to figure out what they have to do. In Stage 1, the girls were wreaking havoc on their new home and the school grounds when they “tore through the austere rooms” and also “supplemented these holes by digging their own [sic]” (page 237, 238). They appear to have no interest in becoming human. In Stage 2,”students may experience a strong sense of dislocation” causing the girls to feel disoriented by the fact that they need to become human (page 239). Regardless of being disoriented, …show more content…
Not great and not terrible, solidly middle-of-the-pack” (page 242). Claudette says that “by Stage 3 I wanted her gone,” which shows that as Claudette and the others are progressing, Mirabella is not. During Stage 3, the wolf-girls meet with a group of purebred girls and when it states that “it made us nervous to meet new humans” it shows that the wolf-girls were worried about how they need to act with these other girls which proves that they are progressing, and that they actually care about what other people think of them (page 245). In the story, it says “instinctively reaching over to lick Jeanette’s cheek and catching myself in the nick of time” which shows Claudette, although becoming more human, still has her wolf habits, even if she is able to stop herself (page