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

In Karen Russell’s short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” she uses the epigraph, which is based off a book named “The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock”, to show the reader what the wolf-Girls should be thinking or acting like during that stage. An epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of a text or a section of a text suggesting the text’s theme or central idea. In Stage One Karen Russell shows this by devolving the majority of the characters in this stage. Although the epigraph is meant to show what that section of the story should be like sometimes the epigraph's relationship with the girls is not always correct, such as the epigraph is not mentioning some ways the girls feel or the characters feel completely …show more content…
Although the real epigraph may be a smaller epigraph but it indicates a lot more than what is written, such as the “new environment” (225) is Russell showing that the students will not be taught in their natural habitat and will have to adapt to their surroundings. The words “exciting” (225) and “interesting” (225) is how Russell depicts the girls reactions to the new environment they are heading to. Russell also uses “The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock” to show that the epigraphs are based off of this book and should be taken seriously, this book was written on how to make wolf people, humans that were raised by wolves, adapt to human culture and act like a human. This may be somewhat accurate but it doesn’t depict the complete …show more content…
Although the narrator is not ideal, she does follow the epigraph very well, her name is Claudette, and she is the middle of the pack, not the best like Jeanette but not the worst like Mirabella. Russell wrote that Claudette felt that, “Everything was new, exciting, and interesting” (227). Russell was after the motto of the epigraph to affirm its worth, this is where the epigraph is correct and shows its purpose of developing a central idea. This may be valid but even the nuns themselves, who refer to the book often, made a statement about stage one that was not shown in the epigraph, “ ‘Stage 1,’ Sister Maria sighed, taking careful aim with her tranquilizer dart. ‘It can be a little overstimulating’ ” (229). This is the last spot where Russell wants to show that epigraph can only tell part of the story, developing a central idea is as far as the epigraph can explain, it can’t explain defectors like Mirabella and certainly can’t interpret mistakes that would be