Yellow Woman

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1974

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Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Water

Water is a recurring motif in “Yellow Woman” that represents multiple things throughout the story. The river itself is a natural border, and its water is constantly changing. Just as the narrator’s identity is in flux, so, too, is the river. She wakes up there at the start of the story, and in the end, the river leads her home.

The sexual imagery is also rooted in types of moisture—when she wakes, her “thigh clung to his with dampness” (Paragraph 1), and later, “his skin [is] slippery against [hers]” (Paragraph 56). Water can be cleansing, and it can be dangerous; the narrator’s experience with Silva is similarly transformative but ambiguous.

Finally, there is a connection between blood and water. Near the end of the story, Silva washes his hands in a bucket after bringing back a beef carcass he intends to sell. An entire paragraph is dedicated to describing the water, which is now tinged with blood in addition to “white and brown animal hairs” (Paragraph 62). This stands in contrast with both the clean moving river and the tactile imagery related to their sexual encounters. The blood has tainted the water. When they encounter the rancher, the blood soaking through the sacks reveals the meat that Silva has likely stolen. This taint or contamination to the water indicates a shift in the story, leading into and through the climax.

Hunger

Hunger is a symbol in “Yellow Woman” that serves to prompt the narrator to move from one stage to another in her decision-making process. Her physical hunger symbolizes her spiritual hunger for a full identity beyond what has been prescribed by the world around her. She is hungry for food, but she is simultaneously hungry for sexual intimacy, a clear sense of her identity, and the tradition of her culture.

When she wakes in the beginning of the story, hunger leads her away from Silva. However, her desire brings her back—a hunger for something other than food, which is stronger than her physical hunger. On the way up the mountain, she becomes hungry again when she thinks of her grandfather’s stories, and that hunger leads her to think of her family. When she wakes the following morning, she decides to leave, “but first I had to eat” (Paragraph 57). This leads her to the apricots, and she falls asleep while eating. Here, she is hungry less for food and more for the land around her.

Her hunger is symbolic. This symbol repeats because, as she travels, she has to acknowledge each need connected to her identity—her hunger isn’t satiated by food, but ultimately by her experiences.

Mountains

The mountains, like the water, are symbolic of boundaries. Like rivers, mountains are natural borders, and the narrator must choose between the mountains and the pueblo below. The mountain is also a force of stability. It doesn’t move or change, and it resists attempts to level or bore through it. Silva lives on the mountain, and he can survey the land as though it were a map: “From here I can see the world […] The Navajo reservation begins over there […] The Pueblo boundaries are over here […] The Texans have their ranches over there” (Paragraph 43). That literal bird’s eye view allows Silva a unique perspective on the connections between the Indigenous people in the area and the non-Indigenous people, and he shows that to the narrator.

The mountain in the story is symbolic of Indigenous tradition, emphasizing the awareness of boundaries and borders as natural things rather than things engineered or enforced by law. The Indigenous traditions and stories persist just as the mountain does. Both of them provide a unique perspective regarding the truths about human behavior. When the narrator chooses to return home, she does so in the shadow of the mountain, with a new understanding of the land after viewing it from the mountain’s top.

Yellow Woman Myth

The Yellow Woman stories are referenced multiple times and come to serve as a motif of the narrator’s alternate identity. The central question of the narrator’s identity is tied directly to the story of Yellow Woman. In the myths, Yellow Woman is characterized as a person who lives alone in a house and is innately seductive. There are two Yellow Woman stories. The first is the Coyote and Badger story, in which Yellow Woman is desirable enough to push Coyote to trick Badger into staying in the ground all night. The other story is about the ka’tsina spirit from the north: “Yellow Woman went away with the spirit from the north and lived with him and his relatives. She was gone for a long time, but then one day she came back and she brought twin boys” (Paragraph 22).

It is unclear in these myths whether Yellow Woman goes willingly or is taken. Many Indigenous American stories have several versions that change depending on the tribe and even the individual storyteller. That ambiguity is also present throughout Silko’s story, in which she retells a traditional story by bringing it into the present and embedding the original story within it as a motif. This draws attention to that ambiguity, creating uncertainty and conflict.