Orion by Jeanette Winterson (1998): A Review

Title: Orion

Book: The World and Other Places

Author: Jeanette Winterson

Publication Year: 1998

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Genre: Short story, Myth, Retelling

I love retellings of myths and fairy tales that trust readers to understand their ideas without standing on a chair and shouting the message through a megaphone. Winterson’s “Orion” is one of those stories.

That does not mean the story is politically or philosophically neutral. Quite the opposite. Winterson retells the myth of Orion and Artemis through the postmodern lenses of feminism and gender studies, while casually adding enough philosophy of the self to make you question who you are and why you opened the book without preparing academically.

In the traditional myth, Orion is generally remembered as a mighty hunter and heroic masculine figure. Winterson looks at this celebrated identity and asks a slightly less flattering question: what if all that hunting, conquest, and heroic ambition is not greatness but a deeply destructive compulsion?

Her Orion exists in what she calls the “future continuous”. He is always pursuing the next animal, achievement, or conquest. He cannot remain in the present because his identity depends on what he will kill, possess, or dominate next. His entire sense of self is built externally, through a growing collection of victories and carcasses.

Very heroic. Very masculine. Very much in need of therapy.

His violence against Artemis becomes the inevitable result of this worldview. When a person understands the world entirely through conquest, everything and everyone eventually becomes another territory to claim.

But Winterson refuses to let Artemis remain a passive victim whose suffering merely advances someone else’s heroic legend. Artemis chooses her response and arranges Orion’s death through the scorpion. This is not fate conveniently arriving to tidy up the myth. It is deliberate retribution.

Her refusal of marriage and domestic life is also presented not as a deficiency, punishment, or sign that something is missing from her existence. She simply does not require those institutions to complete her. She knows who she is and does not need Orion, marriage, or society to provide her with an identity certificate.

This is where Winterson quietly brings existentialism and feminism into the forest. The self is not a finished object handed to us at birth. Identity is something we continually create through choices and actions. Artemis refuses the role that mythology and patriarchal tradition have prepared for her and chooses what she will become instead. Don’t get me wrong, it is not a glorious victory from day one. Artemis pays the price!

There is also a strong post-structuralist element here because apparently one branch of philosophy was not enough. Derrida and Foucault have entered the myth, and nobody invited them.

Winterson treats identity, truth, and even mythology itself as unstable constructions. Stories change depending on who tells them, language shapes how we understand ourselves, and the constellations above us are not as fixed as they appear. If the stars can shift, surely the meanings attached to them can shift too.

The use of grammatical tense becomes especially important. Orion lives in the future continuous, endlessly chasing what comes next. He cannot simply exist because he must always be becoming something through another conquest. Artemis, meanwhile, represents a different relationship with the self: inward, self-defined, and connected to something larger than possession or linear progress.

Ultimately, Orion represents an old and destructive way of constructing identity through violence, conquest, and domination. Artemis offers another possibility: a self that is fluid without being uncertain, independent without being incomplete, and connected to the world without needing to own it.

So yes, this is technically a short retelling of Orion and Artemis.

It is also a feminist revision of mythology, a postmodern argument about language and identity, a philosophical meditation on the self, and a warning that relentless ambition may eventually get you killed by a scorpion.

Personally, I think the scorpion made several excellent points.