Yellow Women Who Run With the Wolves

In summation, Silko’s short story “Yellow Woman” details the Pueblo Indian narrator’s affair with a Navajo man who spends his time roaming the mountains and stealing white men’s cattle. The most prominent aspect of this story is the conflation of the narrator and her lover with the Yellow Woman and the Ka’tsina spirit—two entities found in the mythologies the narrator connects with her grandfather. The narrator initially asserts that it is impossible for her to be the Yellow Woman and Silva the Ka’tsina spirit, yet as the story progresses, we see that Silva consistently refers to the narrator as “Yellow Woman.” This, in turn, blurs the line between reality and mythology and causes the narrator to believe her current and (possibly) fleeting identity as the Yellow Woman means that she is bound to the same fate as the Yellow Woman. She finds herself unable to escape whatever forces are compelling her to stay with Silva and is constantly searching for any evidence that she still exists in her modern world. This, to me, can be read in one of two ways: the first is that the story occurs in the realm of magical realism, thus rendering it possible that she both is and is not the Yellow Woman; the second (which may be grasping at straws a bit) tells the story of a woman who feels so deeply connected the stories of her identity that Silva takes advantage of her and arguably gaslights her into believing she is trapped between myth and reality, which can be observed in the section in which the narrator believes she sees a city, but is then told by Silva that the city is not there. In the first case, the politics of Silko’s story can be interpreted as a Native woman’s struggle to reconcile the erasure of her culture, and thus clings so tightly to the oral tradition that she eventually embodies the woman from the stories in an effort of preservation. If the case is the latter, the then politics become a narrative in which a woman’s imagination is fed and then exploited by a man who seeks only to sleep with a married woman.

This story immediately conjured from my mind an excerpt from Gloria Anzaldúa's “Mestiza Consciousness,” which “is a consciousness of the Borderlands” (Anzaldúa). In essence, the Mestiza Consciousness is a sociological term which refers to Indigenous women and describes the way in which they forge a tolerance for ambiguity. Anzadlúa states that the mestiza woman “learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (Anzaldúa). This material operates as a text about intersectionality in terms of race and gender.

A second text that I connected to Silko’s “Yellow Woman” is Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The central claim of this work is that within all women is a natural and powerful force which is instinctual, passionate, and wise, but which has become deeply repressed in the female psyche. Within this book, Estés utilizes fairy tales, folklore, and multicultural myths as a means of truth, as is the case in “Yellow Woman” when the narrator manifests the titular allegorical woman. Throughout “Yellow Woman,” we observe the narrator’s connection to her natural surroundings—”the sun rising up through the tamaracks and willows,” her “[stopping] to look down” at “the pale sandstone,” and her seeing “faint mountain images in the distance”—which, according to Estés, suggests “the psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying . . .” (Silko; Estés). More than anything, however, I find that “Yellow Woman” connects most directly to this quote by Estés: “In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags . . . with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child . . . as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms” (Estés). With this in mind, it is very possible that the narrator of “Yellow Woman” can, and very well may be, the mythological Yellow Woman.