SOURCE: Beidler, Peter G., ed. “Silko's Originality in ‘Yellow Woman’.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 8, no. 2 (summer 1996): 61-84.

In the following essay, Beidler brings together eight brief essays by various writers that assess the originality of “Yellow Woman” and compares an aspect of Silko's tale to that of the traditional Cochiti story “Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman.”

introduction

Peter G. Beidler

What is most original in Leslie Marmon Silko's story “Yellow Woman”? In an effort to discover the answer to that question, the eight students in my spring 1992 seminar on American Indian Women's Fiction at Lehigh University decided to write a series of short papers in which they compared Silko's 1974 short story with one of the traditional Keresan versions of the Yellow Woman story.¹ Each student, focusing on a different character or theme, would compare Silko's modern treatment of that character or theme with the parallel feature...