Journeying to the Goddess
Why does the narrator follow Silva and accept the role of Yellow Woman?
Ambiguity
At a glance:
Author: Leslie Marmon Silko
First Published: 1974
Type of Plot: Folktale
Time of Work: About 1970
Setting: New Mexico
Principal Characters: A young Pueblo woman, Silva
Genres: Realism, Short fiction, Folklore
Subjects: Sex or sexuality, Marriage, Native Americans or American Indians, Adultery
Locales: New Mexico
Ka'tsina (Kachina) Spirit, In the Pueblo people mythology, the ka'tsina is a beneficent spirit associated with rain and water. In traditional stories, the ka'tsina is sometimes seen abducting a woman who later returns to her community and is endowed with special powers.
Kochinnenako: The Figure of "Yellow Woman"
|The following excerpt is taken from Allen, Paula Gunn.The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. 1986. Rpt., with a |
|new Preface, Boston: Beacon, 1992. 226-27. |
|Note: The passage begins on page 226 of Allen's book; for citation purposes, notice the double slash (//) used in paragraph 3 to indicate the |
|beginning of page 227. (Do not reproduce this symbol in a quotation.) |
|The Keres of Laguna and Acoma Pueblos in New Mexico have stories that are called Yellow Woman stories. The themes and to a large extent the motifs |
|of these stories are always female-centered, always told from Yellow Woman's point of view. Some older recorded versions of Yellow Woman tales . . |
|. make Yellow Woman the daughter of the hocheni [loosely, "rulers"] . . . . |
| |
|Kochinnenako, Yellow Woman, is in some sense a name that means Woman-Woman because among the Keres, yellow is the color for women . . . . Keres |
|women paint their faces yellow on certain ceremonial occasions and are so painted at death so that the guardian at the gate of the spirit world, |
|Naiya Iyatiku (Mother Corn Woman), will recognize that the newly arrived person is a woman. It is also the name of a particular Irriaku, Corn |
|Mother (sacred corn-ear bundle), and Yellow Woman stories in their original form detail rituals in which the Irriaku figures prominently. |
| |
|Yellow Woman stories are about all sorts of things-abduction, meeting with happy powerful spirits, birth of twins, getting power from the spirit |
|worlds and returning it to the people, refusing to marry, (//) weaving, grinding corn, getting water, outsmarting witches, eluding or escaping from |
|malintentioned spirits, and more. |
|Yellow Woman's sisters are often in the stories (Blue, White, and Red Corn) as is Grandmother Spider and her helper Spider Boy, the Sun God or one |
|of his aspects, Yellow Woman's twin sons, witches, magicians, gamblers, and mothers-in-law. |
| |
|Many Yellow Woman tales highlight her alienation from the people: she lives with her grandmother at the edge of the village, for example, or she is |
|in some way atypical, maybe a woman who refuses to marry, one who is known for some particular special talent, or one who is very quick-witted and |
|resourceful. In many ways Kochinnenako is a role model, though she possesses some behaviors that are not likely to occur in many of the women who |
|hear her stories. She is, one might say, the Spirit of Woman. |
| |
|The stories do not necessarily imply that difference is punishable; on the contrary, it is often her very difference that makes her special |
|adventures possible, and these adventures often have happy outcomes for Kochinnenako and for her people. This is significant among a people who |
|value conformity and propriety above almost anything. It suggests that the behavior of women, at least at certain times or under certain |
|circumstances, must be improper or nonconformist for the greater good of the whole. Not that all the stories are graced with a happy ending. Some |
|come to a tragic conclusion, sometimes resulting from someone's inability to follow the rules or perform ritual in the proper way. |
|. |
Notes on “Yellow Woman” Copyright Notice
©1998-2002; ©2002 by Gale Cengage. Gale is a division of Cengage Learning. Gale and Gale Cengage are
trademarks used herein under license.
Yellow Woman
Yellow Woman, or Kochininako, is a central figure in Laguna oral tradition.
Different Yellow Woman stories have various focal points—abduction, meeting with powerful spirits, getting power from the spirit world and returning it to the people, female sexuality, the birth of twins, the refusal to marry, weaving, grinding corn, getting water, outwitting evil spirits.
Silko's story draws from a version in which Yellow Woman goes away with a ka'tsina or mountain spirit from the North and lives with him or a long time. Eventually, she returns to her pueblo with twin sons.
Yellow Woman's nonconforming and often outrageous (by her community's standards) behavior often brings benefits to her people.
She is seen less as a role model for Laguna women than as a remarkable avatar of the spirit of all womankind.
Setting – Time and Place
Place – 2 locations
‘‘Yellow Woman’’ is set along a river, on mountain trails, in Silva's mountain dwelling, and in the narrator's Laguna pueblo in Arizona.
The enclosed world of the pueblo, where the narrator lives with her family, suggests a limited and comfortable world.
The world of the mountains/nature, where Silva takes her, connotes timelessness and mythic knowledge.
Time/Timelessness-- Like many other contemporary Native American stories, "Yellow Woman'' is concerned with liminality, which is a state of being between two worlds or two states of existence.
The unnamed narrator of ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ finds herself between two worlds—that of her everyday life and that of the mythic history of her people. In ‘‘Yellow Woman,’’ nature seems mythic and timeless. When she is along with Silva in the mountains, there is nothing—no highways, cars, or people—to indicate the reality of the late twentieth century. (However, once she is making her way home again, she notices the trails of jets in the sky.)
In the Native American world view,"nature'' includes the spirits as well as the animals and people who inhabit the land, and the land itself.
It is also significant that from the bluff in front of Silva's house in the foothills, he can point out both Texan and Mexican lands to the narrator, underscoring that the story itself takes place in a borderland region.
The world to which the narrator eventually returns may seem mundane—her mother and grandmother are making Jell-O, her husband is playing with their baby—but the narrator now knows these two worlds are inextricably connected.
Story has a dreamlike atmosphere. The identity of the narrator seems ambiguous. The fact that she is not named adds to the story's ambiguity and feeling of mystery.
Ambiguity and Identity
The narrator and her companion potentially occupy several realms of reality at once.
On one level she is a young Native American woman possessing a certain identity. She lives in real time, in a world dominated by automobiles and trains and the bustle of modern life. She has received a formal education; she is a wife, mother, daughter, and granddaughter.
She is also identified with the Yellow Woman of Laguna folktale or legend. She meets and has a brief affair with a mysterious man and then returns home. He is seemingly a Navajo cattle rustler named Silva who has been sought by local Texan and Mexican ranchers for some time.
On another level, he is closely identified with the mountain spirit or ka'tsina Whirlwind Man, who in the legend makes off with Kochininako, or Yellow Woman.
As "Yellow Woman'' progresses, the narrator undertakes what Bernard Hirsch calls ‘‘a journey beyond the boundaries of time and place.’’ She confuses her own identity with that of Kochininako, or Yellow Woman, and that of Silva with Whirlwind Man.
By the time the story draws to a close, the reader sees her as both: a contemporary young woman who lives in real time with her ordinary family and as Yellow Woman, a living embodiment of Native American traditions and values. She now understands that her everyday experience and the timeless, all-inclusive mythic reality of her grandfather's stories are inextricably connected.
SEXUALITY
Transgression, Sexuality, and Power
In many ways, ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ is a story about transgression and power through sexuality. The young narrator leaves her husband Al and her child to follow the mysterious Silva. Although she is a married woman with many responsibilities, the encounter by the the river leads her to leave her old life behind with scarcely a
second thought. In an essay entitled ‘‘Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit,’’ Silko writes: ‘‘Kochininako, Yellow Woman, represents all women in the old stories. Her deeds span the spectrum of human behavior and are mostly heroic.... Yellow Woman is my favorite because she dares to cross traditional boundaries of ordinary behavior during times of crisis to save the Pueblo; her power lies in her courage and in her uninhibited sexuality, which the old time Pueblo stories celebrate again and again because fertility was so highly valued.’’
Some feminists have voiced discomfort at Silko's treatment of female sexuality in ‘‘Yellow Woman."
Writing in Modern Language Studies, Victoria Boynton perceives sexual violence between Silva and the narrator, who knows that he can hurt her if he chooses.
Nevertheless, in Silko's story, the narrator presents herself as a willing participant in the sexual encounters. Boynton acknowledges that Native American critics such as Allen understand the Yellow Woman stories to be celebrations of female sexuality.
Nevertheless she is concerned that the ‘‘rape fantasy’’ represented in ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ is dangerous to women.
In The Desert Is No Lady, Patricia Clark Smith and Paula Gunn Allen explain that"the ultimate purpose of such ritual abductions and seductions is to transfer knowledge from the spirit world to the human sphere, and this transfer is not accomplished in an atmosphere of control or domination.’’
At first glance, “Yellow Woman” is a common version of the old story of a married woman seeking to escape from her boring and unfulfilling family life by having an affair with an exciting, unconventional male. The woman here seems to be rather aimless, listless, and irresponsible: She does not really “decide” to go with Silva or to leave him, but rather finds herself doing certain things. She does not appear to have a very strong attachment to her husband or child, nor does she believe that they will mourn her loss very much. When she does return to her pueblo, she holds on to the belief that the “strange” man will come back to get her one day.
Closer scrutiny reveals “Yellow Woman” to be a rich and melancholy story written by a Native American author who is well acquainted with tribal folklore and quite sensitive to the pathos of the American Indian's life in the modern world. The woman longs not so much for a lover as for a richness, a oneness of life that she has heard about in the stories of her grandfather. She lives in the banal poverty of a modern pueblo with paved roads, screen doors, and Jell-O. She seeks to make contact with the vital world of Coyote (a traditional Native American figure of the creator-trickster), ka’tsina spirits, blue mountains, and cactus flowers—a world in which human, animal, spirit, and nature are one, a dynamic world where reality itself is multidimensional and mystical.
“Yellow Woman” is not a simple story of an unfulfilled housewife seeking excitement, nor a tribal folktale of a woman lured out of sight of her pueblo by a spirit (who is linked to Coyote) and who is then unable to escape from his power. Rather, it is a fusion of those stories and more. The woman is not seduced by a man or a ka’tsina spirit so much as by the possibility that “what they tell in stories” may be true in the present, that the world may not have been wholly stripped of its magic and its unity. She is not deceiving herself when she thinks that she might be Yellow Woman; rather, she is trusting to her Indian heritage, which would free her from the white dogma that personal identity is both absolute and final.
She returns to the pueblo somewhat chastened, for she knows that Silva is, among other things, a rustler and a murderer; she knows, too, that he is fierce and free of white domination and that he may be a ka’tsina as well as a man. She has not lost faith in stories, in Yellow Woman or Coyote. It is clear that the poverty of life in the pueblo is spiritual as well as economic, and that the Native American (but not Yellow Woman) is in grave danger of following the white man into his sterile, rational landscape where Mother Earth is plowed up and paved over, Father Sky is polluted with “vapor trails” and acid rain, Coyote is merely a coyote, identity is a prison, and stories are only stories.
Native American Cosmology and World View ©1998-2002; ©2002 by Gale Cengage. Gale is a division of Cengage Learning. Gale and Gale Cengage are trademarks used herein under license.
Balance and harmony are two primary assumptions of the Keres people who inhabit the Laguna and Acoma
Pueblos of New Mexico. As Silko explains in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, the people and the
land are inseparable: "In the old days there had been no boundaries between the people and the land; there had
been mutual respect for the land that others were actively using. This respect extended to all living beings,
especially the plants and animals.’’ Everything in Keres culture—the human, the animal, the vegetative, the
spirit world—is interconnected like the strands of a spider's web.
In Keres theology, the Great Creator is a woman, Thought Woman, or the Spider Woman. There is no time
when Thought Woman did not exist. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen explains that Thought Woman is
the only creator of thought, and that thought precedes creation. With the help of her two sisters, Thought
Woman created the entire universe. Her presence is felt everywhere—on the plains, in the forests, in the great
canyons, on the mesas, beneath the seas. She is, writes Allen, "the Old Woman Spider who weaves us together
in a fabric of interconnection.’’(Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
Style and Technique (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
Perhaps the most striking technical dimension of this skillfully written story is Leslie Marmon Silko's masterful use of a first-person narrator. In fact, the real interest in this story resides not so much in the events of plot as in the character of the speaker. The narrator is absolutely credible as a young Pueblo woman: straightforward, unassuming, and unsophisticated. She is also a natural storyteller with an acute sensitivity to the beauty of the physical world and a deep longing for communion with humanity, nature, and spirit, for a fullness and a resonance of life she fears is lost “back in time immemorial.” The simplicity and directness of her prose and the purity of her descriptions are evident from the first line: “My thigh clung to his with dampness, and I watched the sun rising up through the tamaracks and willows.” There is a calmness and a wistfulness in this woman's voice that is quite affecting. She brings both the harsh loveliness of the land and the mystery and strength of the man to life seemingly without effort; they are rendered vividly, not because of ornamention or rhetorical skill but because she responds to them in an elemental, deeply felt, manner.
Two other aspects of Silko's technique merit comment: her use of color and the motif of storytelling. Colors play a subdued but important role here. The author draws on traditional meanings and on naturalistic detail to weave a subtle pattern of associations. The woman is linked most strongly to yellow: “Yellow Woman,” “the moon in the water,” “the deep-yellow petals” of wildflowers, and the “yellow” blossoms of cactus flowers. In the lore of many Native Americans, yellow represents the south (the pueblo is southeast of Silva's home), from which comes summer and the power to grow. During this story, the woman takes root in the alkaline soil of her life, grows, and opens her petals as “moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn.” Her beauty, her strength and fragility, her oneness with life, and her ability to grow are all effectively symbolized by her connection with yellow. The man, on the other hand, is associated with life-giving water: the river, willows. He is “damp” and “slippery,” and holds an “ancient” and mysterious darkness: His body is “dark”; his horse is “black”; he lives in “blue mountains” in a house made of “black rock.” Black is traditionally linked to the west (they travel northwest to reach his house), where the thunder beings live who bring rain, as he brings nourishment to her arid life and parched imagination. The darkness is also suggestive of his violence and sexuality.
The theme of storytelling—the woman's increasingly complex understanding of the relationship between story and reality—is also handled quite skillfully. The woman evolves convincingly from someone who loves to repeat the stories of her grandfather but thinks of them as speaking of a world irrevocably lost, into someone who enters consciously into the reality of a Yellow Woman story and wonders if the first Yellow Woman also “had another name.” Finally, she becomes a creator of stories who knows that old stories and new stories and reality are all parts of the same truth. Silko and the woman who returns to the pueblo would agree with Black Elk: “Whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.”
The Legacy of Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny was a nineteenth century doctrine that the United States had both the right and the moral
imperative to expand throughout the North American continent, which was characterized as an uninhabited
wilderness. The philosophy of Manifest Destiny enabled the genocide of the people who already inhabited the
lands to which white Americans laid claim (genocide is the systematic destruction of an entire people or
culture). In 1834, under President Andrew Jackson, Congress designated all lands west of the Mississippi "and
not within the States of Missouri and Louisiana and the Territory of Arkansas'' to be "Indian Territory''; as
AngloAmericans traveled westward, however, the area designated ‘‘Indian Territory’’ grew smaller and
smaller. During the 1838 Trail of Tears, in which the Cherokee Nation was forcibly moved from the Carolinas
to "Indian Territory'' (what is now Oklahoma), one out of every four Cherokees died from cold, hunger or
disease. In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, historian Dee Brown writes that Manifest Destiny an "era of
violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the
ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.''
To fulfill its Manifest Destiny, the United States Government made many treaties with the various tribal
nations and broke almost all of them. The stealing of their land is not ancient history to Native American
tribes; Silko's father, LeeMarmon, was a tribal officer for the Laguna Pueblo people who successfully sued the
State of New Mexico for six million acres that were improperly taken.
SINCLAIR COMMUNITY COLLEGE LIT267-Myth in Literature Dr. M. Melendez, Prof.
FEMALE ARCHETYPES
FIFTH LECTURE
The Earthmother or femme fatale
I. Definition of the female archetype in religion, myth and literature.
A. Positive Type-
1. earth goddess – pre-Christian
2. Great Mother (Gaea)
3. Virgin Births
4. Planetary Mothers
a) every culture has its planetary mother, whose fatherless
Son become Savior of the world.
5. The earth mother as Creative Principle-
a) in biblical scripture - Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca and Asenath;
b) goddess - Coatlicue (Mexico)
c) goddess – Xilonen
d) god - Cocijo (male Rain god)
e) Sun god
f) Poseidon (male Sea god)
g) god – Xipe-Totec (god of Renewal)
6. Earthmother as goddess of fecundity
a) Navajo woman baking bread
B. Negative Type-Temptress
1. Medusa
2. A Gorgon
3. Delilah (biblical)
4. The Sirens (mythology)
5. Sylla/Sphinx/Harpies (Mythology)
6. Cleopatra (History)
7. Marilyn Monroe (modern day femme fatale—sex object)
C. Platonic Ideal-
1. Laura (Petrarch)
2. Beatrice (Dante Aligheri)
3. Percy Shelley’s women characters
*Search and the Return to the Womb overlap.
D. Femme Fatale in Literature-
1. “The Middle Drawer” (Hortense Calisher)
2. “A Rose for Emily” (William Faulkner)
3. “Yellow Woman” (Leslie Marmon Silko)
E. Star-Crossed Lovers in Literature-
1. “Araby” (James Joyce)
2. “Romeo and Juliet” (drama by William Shakespeare)
3. Tristan and Isolde”
4. Hero and Leander
5. “Love Story” (20th Century movie)
6. “Westside Story” (20th Century movie)
© 2002, Mildred C. Melendez, PhD. 20 SINCLAIR COMMUNITY COLLEGE LIT267-Myth in Literature Dr. M. Melendez, Prof.
F. The Unfaithful Wife-
1. “The Astronomer’s Wife” (Kay Boyle)
2. Guinever in “Morte de Arthur”
G. The Love Object-
1. Madame Bovary
2. Lady Chatterley
3. Marilyn Monroe
H. Fantasy-
1. Frodo, Sam & Shelob in “The Two Towers” (J.R. Tolkein)
I. Dionysus depicts the feminine principle (the ID in Freud; while Apollo depicts the masculine principle;
II. Early Symbols that Represent the Feminine Aspect
A. Xipe-Totec (god of renewal-god of Spring)
B. Viking’s ceremonial cart
C. “The Lottery” (Shirley Jackson)
1. Rejuvenation of nature
2. Human Sacrifice
D. The forest (symbol of mystery)
E. Water-Rebirth
1. Baptisms/Floods/Washing
F. Literature:
1. As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
2. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
III. Importance of Femme Fatale-
A. Important in literature/religion/mythology/folklore
1. a temptress
2. a witch
3. a vampire
4. succubus
B. Femme Fatale has been traditionally destructive
1. “The Middle Drawer” (Hortense Calisher) an example;
2. not always consciously mean;
3. delights in torturing victims in various ways;
4. doesn’t always destroy them physically;
5. keeps them alive and forces them to commit to humiliations;
6. destroys their souls rather than their bodies.
7. Circe captures Odysseus in the Odyssey
8. Mario Praz The Romantic Agony’s presents-
a) Lilith
b) Scylla
c) sphinx
9. “The Queen of Sheba” (Gustave Flaubert)
10. “Carmen” (Opera by Prosper Merimee)
11. “Cleopatra” (Theophile Gautier)
12. “Fastasia Filippovna (Fodor Dostoeyvsky)
© 2002, Mildred C. Melendez, PhD. 21 SINCLAIR COMMUNITY COLLEGE LIT267-Myth in Literature Dr. M. Melendez, Prof.
13. “Atalanta” (Algernon Charles Swineburne
14. “Sister Helen” (Gabriel Rosetti)
15. “A Rose for Emily” (William Faulkner)
C. The Temptress is often a Sensuous Woman
1. “Yellow Woman” (Leslie Marmon Silko)
IV. Earth Mother Qualities-
A. forgives everyone
B. self-sacrificing
C. forebearing
D. forgiving
E. fertile
F. the Jewish mother is a sub-type
1. the mother may appear domineering and possessive
2. she becomes the parasite
3. she devours her progeny
a) destroys anyone who attempts to rescue them
b) “she wolf” who attempts to rescue her twins.
c) “The Revolt of Mother” an example (Penn Warren)
d) “The Astronomer’s Wife” (Kay Boyle)
e) “Chrysanthemums” (John Steinbeck)
f) As I Lay Dying ( William Faulkner)
g) Coatlicue (goddess of the Tehuacan people)
4. Heaven and Hell balance the scales
a) All the Penelopes balance the Circes
IV. Conclusion
A. Literature-
1. relates to other intellectual activity
2. is set against an unfolding cultural panorama
a) clarifies the author-work-audience relationship
b) Stanley Hyman says archetypes “exist along the chain
of communication.”
c) and are part of the reader’s unconscious so they touch
a familiar chord.
© 2002, Mildred C. Melendez, PhD. 22
Myth/Legend/Archetype
The Myth of Kochininako, Yellow Woman
The woman is swept up in the traditional Keresan myth of Kochininako, the Yellow Woman, who left her tribe and family to wander for years with the powerful ka'tsina, or spirit, Whirlwind Man. The story features a compelling blurring of the boundaries between myth and everyday experience, between contemporary Native American life and ancient myths.
In The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Paula Gunn Allen observes that many different Kochininako, or Yellow Woman, stories circulate among the Laguna and Acoma Pueblos in New Mexico. The themes of these stories, she writes, are always femalecentered and told from Yellow Woman's point of view. Allen notes that Yellow Woman stories concern many different things—abduction, meeting with powerful spirits, getting power from the spirit world and returning it to her people, the birth of twins, the refusal to marry, weaving, grinding corn, getting water, outwitting evil spirits.
Often, Yellow Woman stories highlight her alienation from her people. In some of the stories she is punished for her differences; others celebrate the ways in which her nonconformity helps the community.
Kochininako might be seen as a role model for women, Allen suggests that she more accurately represents "the Spirit of Woman.’’ In her essay, ‘‘Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit,'' Silko agrees: "Yellow Woman is my favorite because she dares to cross traditional boundaries of ordinary behavior during times of crisis in order to save the Pueblo; her power lies in her courage and in her uninhibited sexuality, which the old time Pueblo stories celebrate again and again because fertility was so highly valued.... In each story, the beauty that Yellow Woman possesses is the beauty of her passion, her daring, and her sheer strength to act when catastrophe is imminent.’’
The narrator recounts that in the old stories, Yellow Woman went away with a spirit from the North and lived with him for a long time. Eventually, she returned to her pueblo with twin sons. The narrator and the stranger make love in the river sand again, and she wonders if what she is currently experiencing ‘‘is what happens in
the story.’’ She speculates that the Yellow Woman of the ancient story may have been an ordinary woman with a family who did not realize, at first, that she was being taken by a mountain spirit.
Silva
The stranger whom the narrator encounters by the riverbank is called Silva. He is a cattle rustler who lives alone in the mountains and does not belong to any tribe that the narrator can ascertain.
Silva repeatedly calls the narrator "Yellow Woman,’’ and the narrator begins to identify herself with Yellow woman and Silva with Whirlwind Man, the ka'tsina who takes Yellow Woman to his House in the Sky in the myths.
Silva says he can ‘‘see the whole world'' from the prospect before his isolated mountain house, though the narrator cannot even see her home from that vantage point.
Silva tells the narrator that he steals cattle from the Texan and Mexican ranchers (who of course initially stole land from the Native people).
Twice the narrator appears to be leaving him; once she returns to his
mountain dwelling, but the second time she goes back to the spot where she first saw him by the riverbank. She wants to return to him then—‘‘to kiss him and to touch him’’—but the mountains seem very far away by then, and she continues to her own home, believing that one day she will find him again waiting for her by the river.
Storytelling, Transience, and Transcendence
Another important theme in ‘‘Yellow Woman" is the centrality of storytelling to a community's history and sense of itself. Native American cultures, including the Laguna, about whom Silko writes, have a rich oral tradition, in which favorite stories are repeated over and over again in family and ceremonial settings.
Through the verbal retelling of ancient myths, the community is able to see the relationship of its presence to its past. But in the face of modern lifestyles, the oral tradition is dying; the narrator's grandfather, who loved the old stories, has passed away, and the narrator does not know anyone who can tell the ancient myths the
way he did.
In ‘‘Yellow Woman,’’ the narrator repeatedly insists that the story of Yellow Woman bears no meaning in her own life, that it could not happen in contemporary times. She suggests that the story is exists only in the past and that it has no relevance for her own life or for that of a latetwentieth-century Native American community: ‘‘The old stories about the ka'tsina spirit and Yellow Woman can't mean us,’’ the narrator comments. ‘‘Those stories couldn't happen now.’’
As the narrative progresses, the narrator begins to realize that she, too, has a tale to share with her community: ‘‘I decided to tell them that some Navaho had kidnapped me.’’ By contributing her own story to the community's rich oral traditions and by seeing the resemblance of her own experience to that of Yellow Woman, the narrator transcends her individual identity. True, she is a contemporary young mother who has
been to school and has followed a strange man on an adventure, but she is also more than that. She is an incarnation of the mythic Yellow Woman. As the narrator's story is repeated among the people in her community, her individual narrative will become part of the larger narrative of the community and its history.
As Silko says in Melody Graulich's book, Yellow Woman: Women Writers: Texts and Contexts, "Within one story there are many stories coming together.’’
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