Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Yellow Woman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity
Reality and Myth
Time, Storytelling, Prophecy
Native American Culture, Identity, and Experience
Summary
Analysis
The narrator follows the river back toward the pueblo. She stops to drink the river water and sit in the shade. As she rests, she thinks about Silva, feeling sad that she left him. Even so, she still feels confused about him. Eventually she comes back to the place by the river where they first met, and she feels an urge to return to him, but resists it. She tells herself that he will be waiting for her again one day.
Just as the river guided her to her affair and mythical experiences with Silva, it guides her back home again. Though she heard gunshots after leaving Silva, she never expresses concern over his safety but, instead, she feels certain that their storylines will cross once again. Her thoughts suggest that she has accepted the Yellow Woman stories as a prophecy of her own fate.
Themes
Walking back into the village, the narrator reaches the door of her house and is greeted with the sounds and smells of home. Everything seems normal inside with her mother and grandmother fixing Jell-O and her husband playing with the baby. She decides to tell her family that a Navajo kidnapped her, but she wishes that her grandfather was around to hear her story, a Yellow Woman story.
The narrator’s senses signal a return to familiarity and the modern world. Her choice to tell her family that a Navajo abducted her suggests that her family—people who seem firmly rooted in a reality of Jell-O and pickup trucks—is more comfortable accepting that version of her experience than they would be accepting the truth of a Yellow Woman story. When missing her grandfather, she refers to her own story as a Yellow Woman story, which indicates that has accepted her identity as both the woman from the pueblo and Yellow Woman.
Themes
