Yellow Woman Who Is Yellow Woman? Unfortunately Book Report

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Yellow Woman

Who is Yellow Woman? Unfortunately for the fussy reader who prefers everything in a narrative to be neat and orderly and clear-cut, this is a question that has many different answers. But as difficult as it is to define yellow woman in specific terms, one can make several general observations about her. For starters, there is a pluralistic quality to yellow woman. That is to say, yellow woman is a metaphor for many different things.

In the preface to the Yellow Woman stories in the collection, Spider Woman's Granddaughters, this fact is pointed out, "Yellow Woman, like the tradition she lives in, goes on and on. She lives in New Mexico (or that's what they call it at present), around Laguna and other Keresan pueblos as well. She is a Spirit, a Mother, a blessed ear of corn, an archetype, a person, a daughter of a main clan, an agent of change and of obscure events, a wanton, an outcast, a girl who runs off with Navajos, or Zunis, or even Mexicans. She is also a mother of little war twins, consort of the sun, granddaughter of the one who plays with stars, somehow (obscurely?) related to Grandmother Spider…(Allen 211)."

Perhaps the overall point the author is making, is that Yellow Woman is who the reader or the listener wants her to be. There is fluidity to her meaning and her character from story to story, from tradition to tradition. This fact becomes more apparent the more one reads the different variations of the Yellow Woman narrative. So, it can be assumed that one can choose how to identify with the different Yellow Women, in the multiple narratives, in the manner he/she sees fit.

That said one has to also consider that this interpretation may in fact be the inverse of how one should go about defining Yellow Woman.

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In other words, Yellow Woman isn't so much defined by the reader or listener; rather she is defined by the speaker or the storyteller. Because Yellow Woman is in many ways amorphous when viewed in terms of a character that has been refashion and repurposed over the ages, it may be that to really understand who she is from story to story, one must examine who the authors who have recreated her are.

To explicate this idea, one should juxtapose the styles in the different narratives to get a feel for how the author has elected to render his/her Yellow Woman. In "Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman" the author has opted to make Yellow Woman, and Yellow Women for that matter, victims. She is, and they are, victims of the Evil Kachina. The author writes, "Therefore he always takes away the Yellow Women. He has fooled many poor Yellow Women. They all died there on the ice (215)." The Evil Kachina abducts and kidnaps and often kills Yellow Women so much so that the reader gets a sense that Yellow Women are a representation of female vulnerability. Although he doesn't kill the main Yellow Woman in the story, he impregnates her and abuses her. She, like the others, is vulnerable to his attacks. Is the author of this early Yellow Woman narrative a vulnerable woman? Is she commenting on the plight of Native American women? Were they considered property, something to be possessed? All of these questions are important to discovering who his/her….....

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