From philosophy to psychotherapy: retelling the story in Jeanette Winterson’s
Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles (2005)
© Fiona Hobden, University of Liverpool
ABSTRACT
Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson retells the ancient Greek myth
of Heracles’ encounter with Atlas, when the hero arrives to fetch apples from the Garden of
the Hesperides. As one of the first stories published in the Canongate series ‘The Myths’, it
shares a commitment to the notion of myth as ‘universal and timeless’, offering ‘narratives that
remind us of what it means to be human’. However, Winterson’s ‘Cover Version’ (as the author
calls it) challenges this conventional frame of thinking. By focalizing the myth through Atlas
and Heracles and making their encounter a stimulus towards self-reflection for both
protagonists, Weight presents a philosophical meditation on Fate and Freedom and the limits
of self-determination – a universal conundrum of human existence.
However, the story
features a third character, a first person voice that replays experiences familiar from
Winterson’s personal mythology and who shares the predicament of Atlas and Heracles. All
three characters are bound by and seek release from their circumstances and nature. ‘To tell
the story again’, a refrain that captures the authorial first person’s desire for transformation
and Winterson’s creation of a new myth for Atlas and Heracles, is to engage in a form of
psychotherapy. In this, Atlas and Heracles represent a new archetype that derives from within
the author and accords with her individual psychoses. The myth retold in Weight is highly
personal. Through a playfully post-modern reception, characterized by intense engagement
with ancient literary forms, multiple voices and a disrupted narrative, Winterson negotiates
what it means for a myth to be ‘universal’ and ‘timeless’, and claims value for her own mythic
truths.