St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Analysis

The Short Story as a Literary Form

The short story as a literary form has the power to convey ideas as complex and nuanced as longer-form fiction. As King (2007) notes, short stories often struggle to find an audience, despite being on the surface easier to digest. Their length makes them well-suited for brief reading, yet the audience seems constantly dwindling. The short story medium nonetheless has precisely the power to articulate everyday issues in meaningful ways, something clearly demonstrated in Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Minus (2009), reviewing an anthology of short stories, supports King's idea that there are still some excellent short story writers in America, even if they are a dying breed. Short stories should carry a fairly high energy level, moving quickly through their narrative — as compact as it is — in order to convey ideas. This should represent a pinnacle of writing, since it demands that the author be efficient and write every sentence with particular punch. When a story is creative and powerful, it achieves what a great short story should.

Russell's Story and the Immigrant Experience

Russell's story echoes the conflict experienced by bicultural immigrant children. The girls leave their homes of early childhood, which are closer to their birth culture, but in school they become enculturated within their new land. They progress through different stages of growth to the point where they theoretically become bicultural. Yet the bicultural nature is illusory in Russell's work, as the children have lost much of their older culture — the process of assimilation can take only one generation, or at best two.

The immigrant theme is common in literature today. Immigrant stories inherently carry this internal, cultural identity conflict, and are therefore not only powerful but prevalent in immigrant communities (Wagner, 2010). People come to new countries, but if they arrive as adults they often have a strong sense of identity and never truly progress through the different stages described in the story. Their children, however, do, because they are more malleable. It can be a difficult transition, and like the narrator, many people find it easier to choose one culture over another rather than truly becoming bicultural, as the Jesuits in the story suggest. The nature of biculturalism thus becomes a central idea: the people doing the enculturation on behalf of the dominant culture might argue that somebody is bicultural, but internally the story suggests that this may not be the case for everyone.

Colonial Overtones and the Process of Enculturation

There are also colonial echoes in this story. In particular, the imagery of the religious school used for enculturation can be found in Jesuit schools around the world, and was even employed in North America well into the twentieth century to transform people away from their former culture and toward a modern dominant one. The story has power precisely because it is open to multiple interpretations. King praises this work, rightly, because it has energy, context, and can be quite thought-provoking in its resistance to a single fixed meaning.

The metaphor that Russell uses carries specific overtones — in particular, the implication that the immigrants are barbarians (Russell's word) until they have embraced their new culture. This notion aligns with the melting pot narrative of America, which itself carries the same overtones of superiority. The narrator loses her original culture for the most part and struggles to relate to those who have been culturally left behind. This conclusion highlights the nature of the conflict: cultural change can separate a people from their past. The Jesuit lessons, which present this stage of assimilation as superior to earlier stages in which people still value their original culture, make clear that forced enculturation carries with it the presumption of cultural superiority.

Conclusion

Short stories are still vital. Critics will be as they will be, but ultimately the short story can retain its power as a medium if given due support. There are few avenues for short story writers, and none of them are profitable. Yet the work they do clearly resonates. They express matters of the human condition succinctly and with great style. The market's failure to find a home for such works is lamentable, but profit is not the only reason for a writer to write — nor, ultimately, can it be.

References

Brown, J. (1997). Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Wellesley College.

King, S. (2007). What ails the short story. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html

Minus, E. (2009). Competent, fair, good, better, best. Sewanee Review, 117(2).

Russell, K. (2009). St. Lucy's home for girls raised by wolves. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from http://cisyeo.pbworks.com/f/Girls+Raised+By+Wolves.pdf

Wagner, V. (2010). The Canadian immigrant experience, in short. Toronto Star. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2010/03/24/the_canadian_immigrant_experience_in_short.html