Relateable monsters
Monster Story Analysis
Over the years, stories about monsters and supernatural creatures have been a popular subject for many writers and authors. Many authors use the topic of monsters and supernatural creatures to explore relevant themes like human nature, survival and isolation. Often these stories deal with typical humans having to deal with inhuman creatures in life and death situations. Although these types of stories have goulish, inhuman creatures, many of the characters have a hint of relatability to them. Sometimes they speak to the outsiders of the world who feel alone and confused, and sometimes your monster can be a brave hero. The two stories I want to highlight that fit into this form are “Lusus Naturae” by Margaret Atwood and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell. Both of these stories deal with themes of forced social conformity, isolation and rejection. Personally, I relate more to the struggle of social conformity in Karen Russell’s story St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves than the themes of isolation and rejection detailed in Margaret Atwood’s story Lusus Naturae.
In Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, she tells the story of werewolf girls who are brought to live at St. Lucy’s Home to learn how to become human girls and live in human society. The wolf girls are trained by nuns to change physically and emotionally to be
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more human and to fit into a new human culture. The story details the struggles of three sisters, Jeanette, Claudette, and Mirabella, who were given up by their werewolf parents for a better life and brought to St. Lucy’s. All three girls experience a variety of challenges in order to fit in their new environment. I mostly relate to the challenges and emotions shown in the character of Claudette.
I believe Claudette is the perfect example of my struggles relating to how I felt in high school. When high school first started, I was totally confused on how it works and who I should hang out with. I have ADHD, so I was always placed in special classes during my high school years. However, I didn’t hang out with those types of kids. Instead, I hung out with the jocks and popular people in my school. Every time I was around them, I wondered If I should conform to be like them rather than to be myself. For example, while I played sports, I never played competitively like most of the group. When it got to my junior and senior years of high school, I felt like the lines between conforming and being myself were more twisted than ever. I wanted to go to the colleges that the popular kids were going to. When I didn’t have the grades to get in, I felt depressed. I felt the need to go out, be in a fraternity and live a party lifestyle. I was confused about my future. Do I go and be like a party athlete or be true to myself and find my own path? Those were my thoughts and questions, which are similar to the feelings Claudette experiences in the story. This is why I think Claudette is such a well written and relatable character, as she is conflicted about her future as she goes through her transformative journey. .
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Claudette is a strong character defined by the need to follow social norms and the pressure to change, both physically and mentally, into a human girl. In the beginning, Claudette details how hard and confusing the rules were to follow. She said “I remember how disorienting it was to look down and see two squares on your feet. Mouth shut, shoes on feet. Do not chew on your new penny loafers. Do not. I stumbled around in a daze, my mouth black with shoe polish. The whole pack was irritated, bewildered, depressed.” The werewolf girls are like most high schoolers, as some understand how to fit in, like the overachiever Jeanette, and some did not, like poor Mirabella. “The pack hated Jeanette. She was the most successful of us, the one furthest removed from her origins”. Then there was Mirabella. “The pack was worried about Mirabella. Mirabella would rip foamy chunks out of the church pews and replace them with ham bones and girl dander. She loved to roam the grounds wagging her invisible tail”. Although Claudette continues to struggle in many situations to adapt to the rules of human society, she was conforming to the culture. “I was one of the good girls. Not great and not terrible, solidly in the middle”.
Ultimately, Mirabella is unable to adapt to human life and is the only girl who returns to the woods. At the end of the story Claudette, now a human girl, has the chance to return home to visit her wolf parents and realizes how much everything has changed and will never be the same.
Claudette is a character that, on the outside, conforms to all the rules of St. Lucy’s. On the inside however, she understands the werewolf she was. Her struggles against conformity and inner turmoil are emotions that I can relate to.
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In St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, I found relatability and identity in the characters but unfortunately, I cannot find the same thing in Margaret Atwood’s story, Lusus Naturae. In the short story, a girl with a rare genetic disorder slowly transforms into a freak of nature, a monster. Her family rejects her and shelters her away in their home. Over time her condition gets worse. She is described as having “yellow eyes, pink teeth, red fingernails and long dark hair that was sprouting on her chest and arms”. None of her family nor the townspeople recognize her as a human being and they see her as a creature. Her mother calls her a thing, a vampire, a monster, and this affects the way she thinks of herself. The family is ashamed of her so they fake her death and have a full burial. The priest “told the neighbors I had died in a saintly manner. I was put on display in a very deep coffin in a very dark room, in a white dress with a lot white veiling over me, fitting for a virgin and useful in concealing my whiskers”. “Now that I was dead, I was freer”. Over time, the woman is at peace with her identity and roams at night in the woods. Her secret life comes to an end when she is discovered in the woods. The townspeople realize she is still alive and come after her. “Perhaps in Heaven I’ll look like an angel. Or perhaps the angels will look like me. What a surprise that will be, for everyone else!” In the end the couragous girl chooses to die instead of being captured and killed. While I struggled with fitting in during high school, the extreme alienation of this story is not something that is as relatable as Claudette’s story. It is hard to relate to the difficult themes of isolation and discrimination that the main character experiences.
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Lusus Naturae are two stories with supernatural characters that deal with the themes of alienation and fitting into society. Both stories detail the
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pressures and struggles in becoming, or failing to be, perfect fits in society. Overall, I really enjoyed reading both short stories and especially related to the character of Charlotte in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.
