William Watson

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2/9/2008

Living the Fairytale

An analysis of Yellow Woman

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Yellow Woman is the tale of a pueblo woman’s foray with a

powerful and forceful cattle rustler named Silva. The exposition of the story establishes

the setting, the main character waking up on the sand next to the sleeping form of Silva, a

man who addressed her by the name of the legendary Yellow Woman and identified

himself as a mystical ka’tsina coming to whisk her away. The complication is offered

freely my Silva as soon as he awakens. For in reply to the declaration she’s leaving he

simply counters with “You are coming with me, remember?”, and to him this isn’t a

question, for what he wants he gets, and she is powerless to resist this godlike power

(1028). She is then taken back to his house, a rustic place of volcanic stone overlooking

miles of trees, all Silva’s domain. He takes her inside and into his bed, and she is afraid to

resist him, yet she almost savors the ravishing, and gently caresses his face. The next

morning she wanders off into the pines, thinking of her family and what they must be

doing, with her mind set to go home to them. Yet when she emerges from the woods she

finds herself back at the door of Silva’s house, drawn in by his power, and her own desire

to be in his story. The climax of the story emerges with Silva and Yellow Woman’s

journey to town to sell stolen meat, meeting a fat cowboy and being accused of rustling

cattle Silva gets an, “ancient and dark” look in his eyes and orders Yellow Woman to run

and return home, and she flees with shots echoing behind her. It’s only with this

permission that she is finally able to go home to her family, giving them a story of

kidnapping while in her heart she waits for her ka’tsina to return.
 William Watson
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2/9/2008

Work Cited

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Yellow Woman.” Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary. 6th
ed. Ed. Charles Bohner and Lyman Grant. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,
2006. 1028-1034.