In the past twenty-five years many Native American writers have
retold the traditional stories of powerful mythological women: Corn
Woman, Changing Woman, Serpent Woman, and Thought Woman, who with
her sisters created all life by thinking it into being. Within and
in response to these evolving traditions, Leslie Marmon Silko takes
from her own tradition, the Keres of Laguna, the Yellow Woman.
Yellow Woman stories, always female-centered and always from the
Yellow Woman's point of view, portray a figure who is adventurous,
strong, and often alienated from her own people. She is the spirit
of woman. Ambiguous and unsettling, Silko's "Yellow Woman" explores
one woman's desires and changes--her need to open herself to a
richer sensuality. Walking away from her everyday identity as
daughter, wife and mother, she takes possession of transgressive
feelings and desires by recognizing them in the stories she has
heard, by blurring the boundaries between herself and the Yellow
Woman of myth.
Silko's decision to tell the story from the narrator's point of
view is traditional, but her use of first person narration and the
story's much raised ambiguity brilliantly reinforce her themes.
Like traditional yellow women, the narrator is unnamed. By choosing
not to reveal her name, she claims the role of Yellow Woman, and
Yellow Woman's story is the one Silko clearly claims as her own.
The essays in this collection compare Silko's many retellings of
Yellow Woman stories from a variety of angles, looking at crucial
themes like storytelling, cultural inheritances, memory,
continuity, identity, interconnectedness, ritual, and
tradition.
This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology,
an authoritative text of the story itself, critical essays, and a
bibliography for further reading in both primary and secondary
sources. Contributors include Kim Barnes, A. LaVonne Ruoff, Paula
Gunn Allen, Patricia Clark Smith, Bernard A. Hirsch, Arnold Krupat,
Linda Danielson, and Patricia Jones.
General
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