Weight - The artistic retelling of stories

QUIZ: In the artistic retelling of fairly tales, does art help counteract ideology (being wounded by culturally induced wishes, unconscious assumptions about life expectations)?

Jeanette Winterson says in her introduction to "Weight" the retold story of Atlas and Hercules, that the retelling of stories and myths is important and can counteract ideology. For example, she says that "in the re-telling comes a new emphasis or bias," meaning that doing so can change what the reader sees as important, or the moral of the story. It can change who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, or who is the bad girl. It can change what truths you take from the texts. As Winterson says that by re-telling stories for their own sakes we can find in them "permanent truths about human nature." Whether or not these truths are ideal is up to the reader.

My perspective, like Winterson, is that yes, it does. However, maybe it’s more reinterpreting or having an additional tool than counteracting a previously written story. The retelling of a story means that we look at it through a different lens. By retelling a story we add more relevance to it, as is the case with Cinderella. Cinderella is about more than just being good and being rewarded, but is about self-transformation and self-assertion.