Setting

"Yellow Woman" is set along a river, on mountain trails, in Silva's mountain dwelling, and in the narrator's Laguna pueblo in Arizona. The enclosed world of the pueblo, where the narrator lives with her family, suggests a limited and comfortable world. The world of the mountains, where Silva takes her, connotes timelessness and mythic knowledge. Although Silko's references to pick-up trucks, highways and Jell-O firmly place "Yellow Woman" in the later twentieth century, in one sense, the setting is timeless: myths cannot be contained by human conceptions of time and place. Since the narrator is simultaneously a modern young woman and Yellow Woman, living both in the late twentieth century and mythic time, it is important to consider that Silko employs a Native American understanding of time. In Native American philosophy, time is dynamic and achronous, or non-linear, meaning that the past and the future always exist in...