Yellow Woman

by Melody Graulich (Editor), Melody Graulich

 In the past twenty-five years many Native American writers have retold the traditional stories of powerful mythological women: Corn Woman, Changing Woman, Serpent Woman, and Thought Woman, who with her sisters created all life by thinking it into being.  Within and in response to these evolving traditions, Leslie Marmon Silko takes from her own tradition, the Keres of Laguna, the Yellow Woman.  Yellow Woman stories, always female-centered and always from the Yellow Woman's point of view, portray a figure who is adventurous, strong, and often alienated from her own people.  She is the spirit of woman.  Ambiguous and unsettling, Silko's "Yellow Woman" explores one woman's desires and changes--her need to open herself to a richer sensuality.  Walking away from her everyday identity as daughter, wife and mother, she takes possession of transgressive feelings and desires by recognizing them in the stories she has heard, by blurring the boundaries between herself and the Yellow Woman of myth. 
Silko's decision to tell the story from the narrator's point of view is traditional, but her use of first person narration and the story's much raised ambiguity brilliantly reinforce her themes.  Like traditional yellow women, the narrator is unnamed.  By choosing not to reveal her name, she claims the role of Yellow Woman, and Yellow Woman's story is the one Silko clearly claims as her own. The essays in this collection compare Silko's many retellings of Yellow Woman stories from a variety of angles, looking at crucial themes like storytelling, cultural inheritances, memory, continuity, identity, interconnectedness, ritual, and tradition.
This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology, an authoritative text of the story itself, critical essays, and a bibliography for further reading in both primary and secondary sources.  Contributors include Kim Barnes, A. LaVonne Ruoff, Paula Gunn Allen, Patricia Clark Smith, Bernard A. Hirsch, Arnold Krupat, Linda Danielson, and Patricia Jones.

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, School, Fiction, College, Adult, Poetry

235 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[emi · Rating 4 out of 5]

(university read)
i feel very lucky to have this story as the subject for my presentation. it is my favourite story so far that i had to read for my class.
it is about the confusion and inner tumult and development during the process of finding oneself. the conflict that arises between rational thinking and heart-felt instincts. letting go of societal systems and truly trusting in what is meant for one.
very much looking forward to talking about this in class!

[Adriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mystical and magical story about a woman seeking her destiny. She leaves behind her family and responsibilities and goes into a mysterious experience with men named Silvia. Through the story we follow her looking and searching for her identity. This short story focuses on one woman's desires and changes. The need to open herself to new possibilities and not known before sensuality. She is drawn by the mysterious, by the desire, by nature and by the myths. The title refers to a native american legend in which a woman is taken by the mountain spirit and lives with him deep inside in the forests. Mystical and interesting read about searching for one's femininity and identity.

[Linda Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

building disbuilding rebuilding

[Kriti Chetri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was gripped!

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this for comp class

[Sophia]

a short story

[Ivy Shack]

McMillen won't stop kicking me while I'm down.

[Bruce Majors]

Makes you wonder if all the myths about virgin births from deities are really beautifications of extra-marital trysts.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leslie Silko is a master of conveying mood. Her short story, even though at first I didn't quite understand the significance or catch many of the details, effortlessly conveyed the feeling of the story- the mysticism, the feeling of entrapment, the interplay of modernity and tradition. The essays that followed did a great job of explaining (I have to confess that I didn't read them as carefully due to the excessive number of references to Silko's other works which I haven't read) but they really elucidated the meaning of the scenery, what the story of Yellow Woman really means, and that brought the original story to a whole new level.

[Lexi V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for LIT 460

Silko writes a beautiful, ethereal story about a modern Puebloan woman willingly seduced by a man who says that he is a kachina spirit. As the story is written in first-person voice, the main character thinks about the husband and child she has left behind, but she loves the natural world more than her honor and is fascinated by the concept of her association with the legendary Yellow Woman. Even as the world is increasingly Westernized, Silko makes a case that the nature of the relationship between men and women does not change and that the stability of the natural world and the transience of human life compensate for any perceived injustice.