From 19th Century Femininity in Literature to 20th Century Feminism on Film: Discourse Translation and Adaptation

Aiming at both identifying the representation of femininity as a social construct and analysing the way in which it can be translated into film adaptations of novels, this work focuses on the interpretations of a famous and, at the same time, problematic literary work, namely the 1994 film Little Women (dir. Gillian Armstrong), reworking the classic nineteenth-century American best-seller “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott. In particular, drawing on the critical apparatus of feminism(s), the paper lays emphasis on the way in which the metafictional texture of the novel captures instances of reality into fiction, glimpses of autobiography and, of course, femininity at the level of the filmic text. Such aspects are then considered from the perspective of adaptation and translation theories: contrasting the literary translation with the audio-visual one, the undertaking means to highlight the losses in the latter mode of expression and the extent to which the defining elements aforementioned are preserved in the Romanian language.