Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman

“Yellow Woman,” a short story in the book Storyteller, by Leslie Marmon Silko, tells the tale of an unnamed, married Pueblo woman’s abduction and her eventual return home. Her abductor, a mysterious, tall cattle thief called Silva, takes the woman on a journey away from her people and to his mountain home. Despite having opportunities to escape, the woman chooses to go with Silva, returning only after a hostile encounter with a white man interrupts her fantasy. Narrated from the first-person perspective of the abducted woman, the story weaves in the Pueblo myth of the Yellow Woman, who was seduced and abducted by ka’tsina, a mountain spirit, and taken to his home in the sky. Silko makes symbolic use of color in to create a “map” of the story, and she uses descriptions of the natural and manmade landscapes through which the narrator travels to highlight the contrast between fantasy and reality. One critic points out that the land is an inextricable part of the Pueblo experience. “As offspring of the Mother Earth, the ancient Pueblo people could not conceive of themselves without a specific landscape. Location, or ‘place,’ nearly always plays a central role in the Pueblo oral narratives” (Glotfelty 269). In Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman,” the landscape does just that, showing her the way to a mythical escape into the …show more content…
Beginning with the second sentence, mention of “brown water birds,” “brown scratches,” and “the alkali-white crust” (52) paint a vivid picture for the reader of the narrator’s environment. “Green ragged moss and fern leaves,” a “red blanket,” and “white river sand” all appear in the first paragraph (52), with paragraph two featuring a black horse and “pale red mesas” (52). According to anthropologist Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons, the Pueblos associate specific colors with the points on a