Yellow Woman

Unlike much of Silko’s work, “Yellow Woman” is more concerned with the individual choices and identity of the narrator than with wider reaching political activism. The repeated instances of ambiguity throughout the story, especially tied to names and memory, reflect the internal conflict of the narrator: She must choose whether to stay in the mountains and fully become Yellow Woman or return to the Pueblo and her family, solidifying herself as a modern woman. There is, in her indecision, a sense of Cultural Alienation from her Indigenous roots. The consistent natural imagery connected to Silva and his way of life in the mountains reflects another element of her choice—Tradition Versus Progress.

The ambiguity of names and the dreamlike quality of the story both serve to illuminate the narrator’s sense of indecision. The question of consent connected to her romantic engagement with Silva also highlights the importance of the narrator’s Female Power and Sexuality. The end of the story is steeped in ambiguity, raising and yet refusing to answer the question of whether Yellow Woman returns to modernity because she is violently forced, or because she makes a conscious choice.

The first choice the narrator makes is to leave Silva and return home. After she wakes, she “looked at him for the last time” (Paragraph 1) before going to the horses. The phrasing “the last time” indicates a certainty that she won’t see Silva again. However, when she is on the horse, she “remembered [Silva] asleep in the red blanket beside the river” (Paragraph 3) and chooses to dismount and return to the sleeping man. On her return, she wakes him and appears to make a choice by stating that she’s leaving. She doesn’t ask or suggest she might leave; she says “I’m leaving” (Paragraph 6)—this is definitive. However, by telling him, the narrator gives Silva the ability to persuade her otherwise, taking the authenticity of that choice away from her.

Rather than physically forcing her to come with him or arguing, Silva says, “You are coming with me, remember?” (Paragraph 7). This calls on the narrator’s memory and asks her a question, but the form here suggests that the choice has already been made, because—rather than ask her to come with him, or tell her she must, or try to convince her it’s a good idea—he asks her to recall the past instead of choosing in the present. When the narrator tries to remember, however, she can only recall sensations of their time together, not that she agreed to or was supposed to be coming with him. The narrator’s lack of agency as she leaves the riverbed with Silva suggests that she never makes a conscious decision to go with him—which means that Silva is effectively controlling her.

This display of power is often coupled with the narrator’s lack of definitive choices. Later, when the narrator is seemingly presented with another choice, a similar pattern ensues. When Silva lies in bed after they get to his house, he asks, “What are you waiting for?” (Paragraph 50), as though her joining him in bed is inevitable. Without questioning or debating, she lies down next to him; his rhetorical phrasing limits her response, so she follows where his words lead. After he begins to touch her, though, she turns away from him. Instead of allowing her to make a choice now, he physically restrains her. This is not the only instance of him using physical force. Earlier in the story, when he holds her wrist, she says, “I had stopped trying to pull away from him, because his hand felt cool” (Paragraph 27)—as if trying to pull away might change this and invoke his anger. When he restrains her in bed, she is “afraid because [she] understood that his strength could hurt [her]” (Paragraph 56). In this way, Silva and his strength limit the narrator’s ability to make a genuine decision.

Silva’s strength is connected to his consistent certainty—a certainty that the narrator lacks. She does not feel like she can make a choice and instead looks to Silva to tell her what to do numerous times. While it appears that the narrator has multiple opportunities to leave, Silva need not physically restrain her when his mental hold on her is just as strong. When she wakes by the riverbed and later when they ride to Silva’s house, she is on her own horse and could easily have chosen to reverse directions; however, the narrator is living between two worlds on the edge of indecision, emphasized by her wandering and dreamlike haze—even while Silva is gone. She is staying with Silva not because she wants to, but because she has not decided which world to live in and which identity to claim. The unhealthy relationship she has with Silva—one dictated by fear and control—keeps her in that indecisive state.

The time she spends walking through the mountain after she wakes alone shows her caught between worlds, while the imagery and dreamlike tone the author creates emphasizes that the narrator’s desires are in question, even to her. She thinks, “He was gone, and I had my chance to go now” (Paragraph 56), and as she eats outside, she “drowsed with apricots in [her] mouth” (Paragraph 57). She is in the grip of her own story—the grip of Silva’s hand on her wrist—and in this moment, she is submitting to the pleasure of that story, which is aesthetic, erotic, and symbolized here by the taste of those apricots. Not only does she stay on the mountain, she also imagines what will happen to her family in her absence: “[T]hey will go on like before, except that there will be a story about the day I disappeared while I was walking along the river” (Paragraph 58). In this same thought, she reveals a small piece of the story of how she came to be with Silva: “I did not decide to go. I just went” (Paragraph 58). She is definitive only in that she made no choice, and still has not chosen whether to stay or go. This indecision is highlighted by the fact that she returns to Silva’s house, only then remembering that her plan was to go back home while he was gone.

Her time in the mountains ends only after a violent encounter with the representative of the modern and white-dominated world—the white man. It is as though whiteness has intruded on the dream-space of Silva’s natural world, which enchants the narrator and entices her to stay longer. This intrusion also breaks the spell Silva has had over her since she went with him two days prior: Every time he has told her what she will do, she does it without question. This time, when he says, “Go back up the mountain, Yellow Woman” (Paragraph 72), she goes down instead, “because [she] thought it was safer” (Paragraph 77). Her thoughts have cleared, and she is making choices with rationales—this is the first time she has explained her actions with the word “because.” Her route home similarly is characterized by a consciousness of choice. She goes back following the river because she “had decided it wasn’t very far to walk if I followed the river back the way Silva and I had come” (Paragraph 78), and finally when she gets home, she “decided to tell [her family] that some Navajo had kidnapped [her]” (Paragraph 80). It is at this moment that the narrator grows as a character; she finally chooses a story for herself, rather than letting someone else tell it for her.

The movement away from Silva—away from traditional Indigenous stories and values—and the return to her home and a more modern world is characterized by the return of conscious choice in the narrator. She decides things, she chooses her own path, and she crafts the story her family will hear. The question remains, however, whether she chooses to return to the Pueblo and a modern identity, a modern life, a modern story, or whether the reality of violence, so present in her last encounter with Silva and the white man, forced her to claim new agency to survive.