Draft Thesis: The appearances, eating styles, and social habits <<A BIT BROAD of Claudette and the other wolf girls, in "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," are changed when they are forced to conform to the dominant society. <<IS THIS MORE OF AN OBSERVATION THAN A THEME? SHIFT TO A THEME THAN AN ARGUMENT ABOUT THAT THEME 

Revised Thesis: The appearances, language, and personalities of Claudette and the other wolf girls, in "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," are changed due to the popularity of conforming to the dominant society.  

Currently there are many resources offered in America to those coping with a personal or interpersonal problem. The degree of stress varies from person to person which determines what form of management is needed. A CEO of a large corporation, for example carries a great deal of weight on their shoulders. The company has high expectations of a person in this position and the responsibility level is incredible. Having such responsibility elevates the level of stress and possibly the need for regular counseling. Since America offers many forms of support, a person with a high degree of stress has the ability to satisfy this lifestyle and find relief. On the other end of the spectrum a college student can feel stressed over a simple writing assignment. Having low self-esteem, the student is doubtful they have the ability to achieve the goal and often will worry about succeeding. With the need for guidance the student can attend a few meetings with a writing center, offered by the college, and accomplish the goal. These examples are a small fraction of how stress and other emotions linked to stress can be manages. Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried, illustrates how these options were unavailable to the American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. The men of Alpha Company were exposed to conditions that affected them both mentally and physically, which heightened the level of their own uncertainties. The men were forced to rely on their own creativity in order to survive from day to day. The novel illustrates how they coped with the pressures of war by carrying personal things, retaliating against the enemy and humor.

Americans have many resources to cope with personal or interpersonal problems. A quick web search will call up counselors and support groups for all kinds of griefs. I used to scoff at such programs until I was faced with the sudden death of my husband. The overwhelming feeling of loneliness was impossible to overcome: I felt numb. After trying to manage my sorrow alone, a friend suggested a bereavement group, and I reluctantly signed up to attend a local session. Surprisingly, walking into a room filled with people that shared these depressing emotions, was comforting, in a morbid sort of way. After listening to others describe their experience I felt less lonely. There is comfort knowing that a person is not alone in the battle to find peace within. I began to realize the importance of developing coping mechanism to traumatic events.  Unfortunately, not everyone can get to a therapy group.  For instance, the soldiers in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried illustrate what can happen to soldiers who don't have the option of therapy sessions. The men of Alpha Company were exposed to conditions that affected them both mentally and physically and  heightened their own insecurities. The men were forced to rely on their own creativity in order to survive from day to day. The novel illustrates how they coped with the pressures of war by carrying personal things, retaliating against the enemy, and humor.

Adversities in Acclimatization: The Immigrant in "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Native born citizens of the United States are often quick to notice immigrants. A daughter translating instructions for her father at a store or a student answering a question in a heavily accented voice are common markers of a foreign born person. What's lacking in this identification are the hardships that these individuals may have encountered in order to start a new life in a different country.

Such hardships are illustrated in Karen Russell's short story, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," where a pack of wolf-girls must transition from wolf-ways to "naturalized citizens of human society" (267).  Like most immigrants, the wolf-girl families wanted their children to have a less complicated, more productive life. And the only way their children could achieve this life was to embrace and live in a new society. Russell does an exceptional job of portraying the adversities of this assimilation. Through the difficulties of learning a new language, growing accustomed to new forms of dress, and curbing old habits, Russell replicates, in wolf form, the acclimatization process of immigrants into a new culture.

Courtroom dramas are among my favorite television shows. A basic tenet of these shows is for witnesses to "swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth," yet accounts of an event can vary as much as the witnesses themselves. The jury's decision regarding guilt or innocence is then based on whose "truth" is believed. And in a trial, the truth is absolute: a guilty verdict can mean death. However, the circumstances surrounding that absolute are subject to many interpretations. Was the perpetrator dark haired and wearing a green jacket, as witness Smith described him? Or should witness Jones's account of a sandy-haired man wearing a navy jacket be taken as the "truth?" The difference between Smith's and Jones's testimony suggests that instead of being an absolute, truth is perception. This belief in truth as a construct is central to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carry. Throughout the novel, he explores this idea of truth as perception by repetition, distinguishing between different kinds of truth, and by showing how easily people are misled by fiction.

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One of the first obstacles an immigrant must face is the language barrier. Clear communication is essential in maintaining a smoothly running society. With a language barrier, simple tasks such as getting from one place to another, ordering food on the food, or voting may become difficult for someone who doesn't understand the language of the country they are living in. This keeps them from fully participating in that country geography, economy, and politics. In order to successfully transition into a new culture, an immigrant must break that language barrier by learning the language of their now new home. The wolf-girls also faced a language barrier, moving from canine sounds to human speech.

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The next transition the girls had to face to fit into their new society was their new culture's dress codes. Cultures have different styles and standards that are deemed appropriate; what is acceptable to one culture may be insulting or intimidating to another. For example, immigrants from tribal nations in Africa might encounter raised eyebrows if wearing their native robes and traditional masks in a Walmart. Instead they would try to blend in with T shirts and Raybans. The same was true for the wolf-girls.

Thesis: The interior conflicts carried by the soldiers is a substantial theme in this story because their minds and hearts encountered great tribulation, they had to find ways to carry on despite their burdens, and their day-to-day lives proved a constant battle.

Since war brought their lives into the balance, the soldiers' minds and hearts encountered great tribulation. The dangers inherent in war made this tribulation -- sufferable trials -- unavoidable. These trials led to conflicts within as well as around them. What contributed most to their distress and burdened them constantly was the fear of dying, which lead to oppressive emotions. The narrator comments that "they carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing...they had intangible weight" (620). The fear of death created "emotional baggage," weighing on their minds and hearts, and by giving them an "intangible weight" the narrator suggests the impossibility of even measuring how much this burdened the men. While not physically heavy, their crushed spirits could leave them incapacitated. The other kinds of baggage -- responsibilities, memories, hopes, and personal desires -- also lead to internal conflict. For instance, the Lieutenant and platoon leader Jimmy Cross carried his crush on Martha. His longing became a distraction that contributed to Lemon's death. This conflict of interest resulted in "something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war" (618). Cross's internalization of this tribulation has a physical dimension: "a stone." This captures the emotional weight of his trials, providing a physical symbol of the emotional burdens he needs to "carry."

While religion is often seen as a humanizing, moralizing force, the story makes clear that the human representatives of religion -- the nuns -- are not exempt from the more negative aspects of human nature. The nuns blatantly encourage unhealthy competition between the girls in order to keep the good reputation their institution has built up. The more wolf girls  transform into proper young women, the more the institution is deemed a success. Their inhumanity starts by separating the sisters of the pack from their brothers, thus fostering a more competitive atmosphere. A study documented in Economic Inquiry stated, "[A]lthough girls educated in a single sex environment are the most risk averse, they are also among the most competitive" (Laury et al). Whether they were completely aware that the "single sex environment" they were educating the girls in was perpetuating their competitive nature or not, the nuns perpetuated it in other way as well. When the oldest girl, Jeanette, begins to pull ahead of the pack in terms of development, the nuns begin to blatantly favor her and make her sisters feel inferior. Claudette tells of Sister Maria de la Guardia, "Then she would sing out the standard chorus, 'Why can't you be more like your sister Jeanette?'" (269). Comparing a child to his or her sibling can have a severely negative impact on that child's self-esteem and cause the child to resent the sibling they have been made to feel lesser than. Stories of toxic sibling rivalry can be traced all the way back to the first book of the Bible. An excerpt from the Journal of Analytical Psychology makes the connection to religion explicit, recalling that "Cain and Abel set the stage. The offerings of the younger brother, a shepherd, are preferred over the offerings of his elder brother, a farmer (Genesis 4:3-5). Cain endures this humiliation until envy overcomes him and he destroys his brother" (Stein 168). While the girls in Russell's story do not resort to physical violence against one another as Cain did, the resentment towards Jeanette is palpable. Claudette even states, "The pack hated Jeanette" (269). If the girls were still with their biological parents and operated as wolf pack and Jeanette proved to be the most successful hunter, the pack would not have hated her for being better than them. They would have relished in her skill because it would have benefited all of them. However, now that they are at St. Lucy's the nuns do not encourage Jeanette to help her younger sisters and share her success, they just encourage the other girls to compete more aggressively to be like her.

Having a sense of humor in difficult situations is one effective coping technique in "The Things They Carried."  Beyond the battlefield, people cope by using humor all the time. Perhaps a child is in the emergency room to get stitches and is afraid. A parent sitting there with them may try to ease the situation with humor. They may take one of those medical gloves and blow it up like a balloon. With all five of those bloated fingers sticking out, the parent places it on their head and pretends to be a rooster; a silly yet entertaining and humoring way to ease the child's stress and fears. This example shows a more light-hearted way of using humor in life to cope with a stressful situation. In fact, according to a study by psychologists Herbert Lefcourt and Rod Martin, "stressed-out folks with a strong sense of humor become less depressed and anxious than those whose sense of humor is less well developed" (qtd. in Doskoch). Therefore, in O'Brien's novel, the characters use humor to cope with their depressing situation.

Thesis: Though defying the rules can be frowned upon to a certain extent, the story exemplifies the importance of rebellion in maturity through its embrace of disobedience, escape, and eventual acceptance.

Throughout our lives, we have learned about many individuals who made history by speaking out against injustice. Some may argue that breaking society's rules is deviant behavior, but some of these rules have violated morals and needed to be broken in order to improve society. For instance, segregation was the law of the land in America from the mid 1800s until the late 1960s. When she refused to give up her bus seat, Rosa Parks broke these rules and became a historical figure praised worldwide. Eventually, congress named her the 'Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement'" (qtd. in Mays 949). If people did not rebel against segregation, our world may still be as divided and full of hatred as it was in the 1950s.

Becoming an activist is not necessarily a realistic standard for everyone, but non-conformity is not limited to starting a revolution. Changing the world begins with the individual. Another colored girl, Lola, changed her life by disobeying her mother.  Her entire life was devoted to serving her mother only to receive condescending remarks from her mother. Lola described her mother's as "an absentee parent: if she wasn't at work she was sleeping and when she wasn't sleeping all she did was scream and hit" (415). Lola's distaste for her mother developed as she entered her teens. Rebellion was born inside of her when she finally defended herself in a heated argument with her mother, standing up for herself and telling Belicia "And this is how you treat your daughter?" (416). She was aware there would be hell to pay for backtalk, but she would not allow herself to be treated this way any more because she knew she deserved better.

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discover
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indicate
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This ____ suggests that _______
They indicate the ____
This emphasis on finding ______ suggests that ___________
Connected to this ____ is the notion _______.
By explaining _____, the _______ is reinforced/clarified/revealed.
The problem with this/that is _______
The connotations of ____ suggest/illustrates/reveals that _______.
The literary critic ____ argues that this _____ is crucial. He/she writes that ___
Supporting this idea of the war as an oppressive force, the narrator adds __________
The description reinforces the idea that ______.