The Wolves Among Christian Youth Analysis

The Wolves Among Christian Youth In a nation where school shootings are commonplace on the weekly news, students need friends wherever they can find them. What students do not need is even more people groups pushing their agendas on them like cookie cutters, shaping them however their superiors please. Nonetheless, in private education and perhaps even more so in Christian religious private education, we find an increasing amount of this oppressive totalitarianism. Whether on purpose or totally on accident, Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” provides apropos parallels between the re-culturing of young lycanthropes and the “spiritual awakening” of youth in modern private Christian schools. Perhaps the best evidence
Using this book as a guide, the nuns usher this pack of female werewolves through a series of stages to adapt them to human culture. While conformity to human customs is repulsive to her instincts, as time goes on Claudette begins to admire (or at least envy) her older sister Jeanette’s ability to adapt to human culture so quickly. This breeds resentment, as their pack assumes Jeanette feels superior to her sisters. In a hypocritical fashion, when Claudette does finally begin to adapt as Jeanette did, Claudette turns around and takes pity on her younger sister Mirabella, who is unable to adapt to the nun’s teachings. Her inability to conform to the nun’s teachings brings the pack to worry about, and subsequently despise Mirabella. As Claudette explains it, “The pack hated Jeanette, but we hated Mirabella more. We began to avoid her… It was scary to be ambushed by your sister. I’d bristle and growl, the way that I’d begun to snarl at my own reflection as if it were a stranger” (Russell 271). This thin line of duality Claudette walks is much like the one presented to those being forcefully educated in their ancestors’ religion to appease their parents. While a part of such a
What they once knew is now unknown and the future is uncertain. What is certain, is that with little exception, returning to your old ways is out of the question. While Russell’s work drew resoundingly realistic parallels with private Christian education, as a whole it failed to drive home the inherent flaws in their systems. On one hand, the book does not glorify the extraordinary discomfort, uncertainty, and change brought about by the conversion process, but ultimately the protagonist accepts the changes and rejects her more natural ways. In other words, all the flaws are presented in their horrible glory, but no attention is given to them and no solution is provided. In this way, the story is that of a successful conversion on the part of “the system,” and a failure on the part of the converted to realize that what they are being taught is not by necessity right or proper, but simply different. Yes, this interpretation makes the ending wildly less satisfying, perhaps even aggravating as the reader is made to watch Claudette “join the dark side.” Nonetheless, if there is to be any meaningful change in the flawed systems in place, one must first observe directly what is wrong with them, so that we can address the issue. After all, if no one can tell the system is broken, why fix