Yellow Woman

Also known as a frame story or an embedded narrative, a story-within-a-story is a literary device in which a central narrative contains one or more smaller, related narratives that usually unify or reflect back on the central narrative. Stories within a story can occur when a character within a story becomes the narrator of another story within it. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, the play-within-a-play is specifically crafted to mirror what Hamlet believes is happening and elicit a response from his uncle the king. Similarly, in “Yellow Woman,” Silko uses references and retellings of the Yellow Woman story to reflect the confusion in the narrator’s identity, as well as to incorporate elements of Indigenous American tradition and storytelling practices into the story itself.

Silko participates in the cultural act of storytelling. It is common in Indigenous cultures to take a base story and embellish it, adding contemporary details to make it more relevant to the audience. This is largely because Indigenous American stories are a means of cultural and moral education, and it is imperative to keep those stories interesting to a younger generation. The retellings and recurrent references to Yellow Woman both in the narrator’s name and in her discussion of the story connects the stories to modern concerns of agency, identity, and consent.