The essays and stories in Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit depict a traditional society in which myths and legends are passed down from generation to generation. The stories people tell are rooted in the landscape, so children grow up hearing both true stories and myths about real trees and mountains that are part of their everyday lives. In "Out Under the Sky," Silko writes:
At eleven I rode away on my horse and explored places my father and uncle could not have reached on foot. I was never afraid or lonely—though I was high in the hills, many miles from home—because I carried with me the feeling I’d acquired from listening to the old stories, that the land all around me was teeming with creatures that were related to human beings and to me.
In the titular story, "Yellow Woman," the protagonist meets...
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a man who tells her he is a ka'tsina or spirit being, and addresses her as "Yellow Woman." They go to his cabin together and he seduces her, quite easily, as she is drawn to him and is eager to escape from the life she has been living. The woman does not believe the man is literally a spirit, but the idea of his being a ka'tsina, and of her being the "Yellow Woman" seem appropriate to her. Even in escaping from her everyday life, she draws closer to the traditional stories of her people.
Even perfectly explicable contemporary events become part of folklore when they are connected to the mythic landscape. In "The Migration Story," Silko describes a Vietnam veteran parking his car and going into a convenience store to buy beer. The car rolls into an arroyo, which has claimed various other cars, and now has a long mythology surrounding it. Silko writes about this connection between people, myth, and landscape, saying that she feels "a familiarity and even a strange affection" for the ravenous arroyo which symbolizes this connection:
The arroyo demands from us the caution and attention that constitute respect. It is this sort of respect the old believers have in mind when they tell us we must respect and love the earth.
What is the purpose of blending the real and mythic worlds in Yellow Woman?
The boundary between the mythic and the real world is blurred by the narrator's reflection on her encounter with the man she meets by the river. However, the man she meets is also complicit as he refuses to tell her his name; instead, he calls himself ka'tsina, the name of a mountain spirit. The narrator is, for part of the story, in a trance-like state. She is unsure of whether she will be able to return to her home and family. The narrator reflects that her family would be concerned, and that her grandfather would have consoled them by recounting a Yellow Woman story if he were alive. When she returns, however, her mother and grandmother are making Jell-O, and her husband is playing with their baby, so the reader is unsure whether the narrator's story is real and whether she really did disappear for two whole days.
Another purpose of the fluidity between mythic and real world is to demonstrate the origin and purpose of mythology. Often, these stories are used as cautionary tales or to share knowledge of significant or recurring events. The narrator reflects on her actions within the story―having an affair and leaving her family for two days―but decides to say that what happened was a kidnapping. In this way, alluding to the Yellow Woman story functions as a shortcut to describe the experience to her family.
The construct of linear time is challenged by this fluidity as well, when the man by the river tells the narrator that "someday they will talk about us, and they will say, 'those two lived long ago when things like that happened.'" (p3) The line between a concrete past and present becomes just as blurry when the reader is invited to consider that the characters in a text are aware of their status as characters in a text.