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

Gheorghiu, Oana-Celia

Excerpt

ARGUMENT

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 paper 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 audiovisual one, the paper 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.

Translators usually have an unappreciated position in the literary universe.

Although their effort is considerable, they remain unseen, unacknowledged when

their work is qualitative, and poignantly visible when it is otherwise. "Translation is

defined as a second-order representation: only the foreign

text can be original, an

authentic copy, true to the author's personality or intention, whereas the translation

is derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (Venuti 1995: 7).

Having translated Louisa May Alcott's Little Women into Romanian as a

commissioned work for a local publishing house, I fully acknowledge the truth of at

least one part of the quotation above: psychologically, culturally and

temperamentally, the translator could not be "true to the author's personality" due to

The term is questionable and equivocal. `Source text' or `original text' would be more appropriate.

time and spatial differences, although she

has definitely strived to render the latter's

aims as accurately as possible in the TT.

Culture and mentalities are subject to alteration and differentiation both

synchronically and diachronically. Examining the novel in focus, Little Women, one

may best observe how the latter principle functions. It is also important to remark

that, although American and dealing at the surface level with American issues i.e.,

the Civil War or, to a very limited extent, abolitionism Alcott's novel is so much

indebted to Victorian Realism that, seen in retrospect, the cultural difference between

Europe and America does not seem too striking. Nonetheless, without an approach to

the historical conditions in which the novel was written which adds to the

interdisciplinarity of the paper the undertaking would not be conclusive.

Dealing with a group of feminine characters, the novel makes extensive use of

metafictional practices to "foreground the gap between art and life" (Praisler 2005:

70), in other words, to obscure the borderline between reality and fiction, and

incorporates autobiographical elements of its author. Although Alcott's novel may be,

starting from the title, considered demeaning to women, gynocritics

tends either to

excuse its limitations on the grounds of her times' expectations

or even to overbid by

regarding Little Women as a feminist writing avant la lettre. Irrespective of the

critical approach to Little Women, the nineteenth century novel is undoubtedly a piece

of feminine writing within its respective time frame, with specific modes of

representing femininity.

The third-person feminine pronoun is used whenever reference to my translations or my paper are

made. Otherwise, whenever the use of the pronoun is generic, the s/he convention is followed.

Term coined by Elaine Showalter in the 1979 essay `Towards a Feminist Poetics', which denotes the

critical study of the "woman as producer of textual meaning, with the history themes, genres, and

structures of literature by women" (1986: 129).

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own, in reference to Charlotte Brontë's works: "The

Victorians expected women's novels to reflect the feminine values they exalted, although obviously

the woman novelist herself had outgrown the constraining feminine role" (2003: 7).

It is important for the translator to grasp these specificities and render them in

the TT. In order to do so, her work must meet literary translation studies and

(feminist) literary criticism halfway. In order to understand how femininity is

represented in the novel or how metafictional practices are employed at the level of

the literary text, she must resort to literary theory and criticism. Naturally, once

having these questions settled, their rendition in the Romanian language must rely on

the more constraining rules of the literary translation. The final receiver of the

translated text, i.e., the Romanian reader, will only have access to a representation

that belongs ultimately to the translator, therefore she must carefully analyse and

interpret the mechanisms and devices at work in the literary text in order to be able to

provide a "true copy of the author's intentions".

This issue becomes more complicated when the translator has to render the

textual specificities in a feature film. Mention should be made at this point that, in our

opinion, the term text covers more than the spoken discourse rendered in condensed

writing in the subtitle, involving visual, auditory, spoken and written text at the same

time. If one considers the filmic adaptation as an intersemiotic translation, according

to Roman Jakobson's tripartite system of translations (qtd. in Johnson 1984: 421), it

results that the subtitle is actually translating a translation.

The

translation of Alcott's novel posed difficulties at the (meta)textual and

cultural level, cultural differences at work being both synchronic and diachronic, as

the translation came almost one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the

novel, which obviously implied that differences at the linguistic level had to be dealt

with in a mode of mitigated synchronization

similar

form

synchronization is the `translation' of Little Women into

Gillian Armstrong's 1994 production. The film does not `synchronize' or

One can understand the term as a translation mode that `negotiates' between archaisms and

neologisms. In other words, the translation of a nineteenth century text must preserve something of the

archaic flavour, for authenticity purposes, without hindering understanding by the use of too many

obsolete terms.

`recontextualize' by placing the four March girls in a present-day context; it brings,

nevertheless, some glimpses of modernity into the script, so that the obsolescence of

certain mentalities and moral values in the novel could be effaced. It is interesting to

note how the meta-dimension in the novel is rendered in film and how the

intersemiotic translation helps with the representation of femininity. The field of

audiovisual translation is fairly different from that of the literary one, therefore the

paper also aims at discovering the difficulties that arise from subtitling a film

adaptation.

The first chapter dwells on the most important theories applicable to literary

translation, from Nida and Taber's theory of equivalence to Vermeer's skopos theory

and discusses the strategies employed in translation domestication versus

foreignization, archaisation versus synchronisation and standard (literary) language

versus dialect and idiolect. The audiovisual translation, as very distinct from the

literary one, has a completely different set of techniques and constraints, which have

been dealt with by translation theorists such as Jorge Diaz Cintas, Henrik Gottlieb or

Jan Ivarsson. This subchapter raises the specific issue of subtitling a filmic adaptation

of a literary text.

The second chapter analyses the novel which is the hypotext of the film

adaptation in focus, Little Women, and its context of production and reception in

America during the years of Reconstruction (1865-1877), after the Civil War (1861-

1865). Relying on the contextual, historical analysis made by the literary critic Elaine

Showalter (A Jury of Their Peers, 2010) and on the views of the famous feminist

historian Barbara Welter (The Cult of True Womanhood 1820-1860, 1966), its first

subchapter aims at providing historicist explanations for some of the problematic

issues in the novel in respect to womanhood. Its second part focuses on the novel

itself, with an emphasis on the representation of femininity and the relationship

between reality (autobiography) and fiction, both aspects being highly relevant for the

filmic production of 1994, but also for the decision-making during the translation

process. Focus is laid on the feminine characters, decoded in feminist terms, a critical

approach which attempts at framing the novel in the category of women's literature.

The self-reflexivity component of the novel also argues the regard of Little Women as

children's literature exclusively and its rendition into Romanian under the constraints

imposed by this specific literary type. The chapter is rounded off with a selection of

excerpts translated into Romanian employing the strategies outlined in the theoretical

chapter.

The applicative chapter deals with the most recent film adaptation of Louisa

May Alcott's novel, Little Women (1994). It is structured two-dimensionally:

the representation of femininity on film and the reworking of the novel from a

feminist perspective; reality and fiction at work; metafictional practices.

subtitle production and analysis for selected film excerpts which reflect

aspects dealt with in the first part of the chapter. The comments focus on four

different issues: linguistic, technical, cultural, and filmic.

To sum up, the paper discusses the differences in the representation of

femininity in novel and film and constitutes a review of the translator's efforts to

preserve the historical-linguistic specificities of the text under the constraints imposed

by the subtitling rules.

CHAPTER I

Theoretical Approaches to Literary Translation and Subtitling

1.1.

Translation: definitions and delimitations

One may regard the process of translation either as art or science or as a combination

of the two. For millennia, translation has been an activity effacing boundaries and

helping human understanding, a conveyor of cultures across times and spaces. In

English, the word comes from the Latin past participle trnsltus of the verb

trnsferre (=to transfer) (OED, electronic edition, 2009) and was recorded for the

first time around the year 1300. Nonetheless, as Jan Assman (1996: 25) states,

[t]he Babylonians were the first to equate two gods common

functional definition or cosmic manifestation. We may call this

method `theological onomasiology'. By onomasiology is meant a

method that starts from the referent and asks for the word, in

opposition to semasiology, which starts from the word and asks for its

meaning. Onomasiology is by definition cross-cultural and

interlingual. Its aim is to find out how a given unit of meaning is

expressed in different languages.

As the present research does not set out as a history of translation, it would be

better if it skipped over similar aspects in the Greek and Roman Classical Antiquity

and the Middle Ages although mention should be made that one of the first

occurrences of the main current sense in English (to turn from one language into

another; to change into another language retaining the sense; also, to express in

other words, to paraphrase) is to be found in Chaucer, around 1385: Thou hast

translatid the Romaunt of the Rose (OED), which leads to the first of the foci of this

study, i.e., literary translation.

At present, translation is understood

as "the process or result of converting

information from one language or language variety into another. The aim is to

reproduce as accurately as possible all grammatical and lexical features of the source

language (SL) original by finding equivalents in the target language (TL). At the

same time, all factual information contained in the original text must be retained in

the translation" (Meetham & Hudson 1969 cited in Croitoru 1996: 15)

The definition above is one of the most complete ones available, as it relies

upon three meanings for the word translation:

x translation = abstract concept dealing with both the translating process and the

product;

x translation = the product of the process of translation (the translated text);

x translating = the process, the activity performed by the translator. (Croitoru,

1996: 15).

However, a definition of the translation cannot be rounded off with only

grammatical, lexical and factual aspects, for a translation must convey, primarily,

culture. As Sanford Budick puts it (1996: 1), translation points to a

"reconceptualisation of the experience of alterity". While the identity/otherness

dichotomy has become a central postmodern concept par excellence, it cannot be

denied that its essence goes back as far as humanity goes. And translation is a capital

aspect in understanding and dealing with the other, not in reference to individuals,

but to cultures, defined as "patterns, explicit and implicit of and for behaviour

acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of

human groups, including their embodiment in artefacts" (Kroeber & Kluckhorn, cited

in Katan 2004: 25).

On the other hand, culture has always been considered untranslatable (or

extremely difficult to capture in translation). The term is too semantically restrictive,

in our opinion, because of the negative prefix -un

, which actually leaves no place for

opposite of, contrary to

in-betweenness and for what is known as cultural mediation, a term much

vehiculated in translation studies. Another aspect worth mentioning is that cultures

may be actually related, to some extent by means of origin (e.g., Indo-European

roots), political and historical factors (e.g., the Roman conquest, the migrations), or

cultural factors (e.g., Hellenization, Christianisation, colonialism or, more recently,

globalisation) and, subsequently, "the absence in the TL culture of a relevant

situational feature for the SL text" (Catford in Bassnett, 2002: 39) is not actually as

frequent as one might expect. When this absoluteness actually occurs for it does, in

situations of cultural specificity and national identity the translator is at a loss and

the translation as product is rendered incomplete or corrupted. In order to avoid

this, s/he needs possess what Hatim & Mason (1990) defined as `bi-cultural vision',

Vermeer (1978) as `bi-culturality' and Taft (1981) as competencies in both cultures in

terms of knowledge, communication skills, technical skills, and social skills (cited in

Katan 2004: 17-21). Obviously, in such cases, the translator is bound to identify a

cultural equivalent (if appropriate /adequate in context, but this aspect will be

enlarged upon in 2.1.) to paraphrase for rendering the meaning in the TL or to resort

to omission. Accepted/Acceptable to some extent, or, as Mona Baker puts it "if the

meaning conveyed by a particular item or expression is not vital enough to the

development of the text" (1992: 40), this strategy should be nonetheless avoided

or,

at least, used only after all the other strategies have proved their inefficiency.

Omission is a delicate matter, even in point of authority, for it raises the question of

whether the translator is allowed to assume authorship by deciding what is `vital [...]

for the development of the text'. (Besides, cultural specific elements have little

chance not to be vital in a literary text.)

What is truly untranslatable, on the other hand, is the mental image projected

by speakers of the SL and TL, and this may raise difficulties at the simplest lexical

The affirmation is not valid for the audio-visual translation, where omission actually plays an

important part, due to aspects which shall be dealt with in 1.4.

units. Considering the syntagm "big house", the Western Europeans may envisage,

for the denotative meaning only, a castle or a mansion, the Americans a

skyscraper, while the representative of a nomadic culture may very well imagine a

large tent. Fortunately, such syntagms do not occur in isolation and generally,

literary translation relies heavily on context, which may help the translator choose the

best strategy to render in the TT the mental image the author(ess) has intended for

his/her readers.

Translation is, therefore, the process of transferring written information from

one language and culture to another and the product thereof, while the translator

fulfils the role of a mediator between the two cultures. The translated text may pertain

to any field of activity, yet it is true that while some texts require only accuracy and

exactness (e.g., scientific texts), others increase the necessity of the translator's bi-

culturality (from judicial texts, which may presuppose additions in form of

explanation or paraphrase, to the ultimate challenge, subsuming and requiring all the

skills and competences described above on the part of the translator, that is

literature). Whether mirroring reality, as mimesis, or estranging it, as

defamiliarisation, the literary text is cultural text and its translation presupposes,

beyond the linguistic aspect, cultural mediation.

Regarding the film as cultural text, more precisely, the translation/ adaptation

of novel discourse into film as cultural text presupposes, beside the intersemiotic

translation from the written text into various codes, such as visual, auditive, or other

instances of non-verbal communication

, a diasemiotic

translation form subtitling.

Despite its technicalities and constraints, and its over-simplified sentence structure,

subtitling requires "the musical ears of an interpreter, the no-nonsense judgment of a

news editor, and a designer's sense of aesthetics" (Gottlieb 2004: 222) on the part of

the translator. This is why, without advancing such a daring formula of equating the

"In a film, up to four semiotic channels are in operation simultaneously: non-verbal picture, written

pictorial elements, dialogue, and music & effects." (Gottlieb 2004: 227)

In this case, from speech to writing.

subtitler with the `literary translator', there are clearly sufficient reasons to consider

subtitling as falling in the category of translation as art.

1.2.

Views on translation: from equivalence to skopos theory in translating

literary texts

Equivalence may be defined as a relationship of overlapping identification between

the ST and the TT, presupposing, as Mona Baker (1992) observed, four levels: the

word level, the grammatical level, the textual level, and the pragmatic level.

The first approaches to equivalence, e.g., that of Catford (1965) were more

preoccupied with the textual interchangeability and completely dismissed the cultural,

contextual and textual factors. From among the early translation theorists, it was

Eugene Nida who made a major step ahead in defining equivalence. He identified two

types of equivalence: formal and dynamic. Formal equivalence focuses on the

message itself, in both form and content. The primary aim is that of conveying the

message in the TL following all elements of the SL as closely as possible. Thus,

formal equivalence is mainly oriented towards the ST structure, which strongly

influences both accuracy and adequacy. Dynamic equivalence is based upon what

Nida defines as the equivalent effect, in which the relationship between the message

and its receiver must be essentially similar to that between the message and its initial

receivers. The purpose of dynamic equivalence is that of identifying the closest and

most natural equivalent in the TL. It is an approach oriented towards the receiver,

which presupposes adaptations in terms of grammar, lexis and cultural references, in

order to acquire naturalness.

Frequently, the form of the original text is changed; but as long as the

change follows the rules of back transformation in the source

language, of contextual consistency in the transfer, and of

transformation in the receptor language, the message is preserved and

the translation is faithful (Nida and Taber 1982:200).

The factors to be considered in acquiring an adequate and natural translation

in Nida and Taber's view are: the translator must aim primarily at reproducing the

message, with grammatical and lexical adjustments; the translator must strive for

equivalence rather than for identity (i.e., reproduction of the message rather than the

conservation of the form of utterance); the best translation does not sound like a

translation; a conscientious translator will seek for the closest equivalent; meaning

must be given priority; though secondary to content, style is also important. One

should not translate poetry as if it were prose, nor expository texts as narratives

(1982: 12).

Equivalence at the discourse level is a problematic issue in the field of

translation studies. There are three reasons why an exact effect is difficult to attain.

As Hervey, Higgins and Haywood (1995: 14) have asserted, a text can have variable

interpretations even for the same person on two different occasions; translation is a

matter of subjective interpretation of translators of the ST, and translators cannot

determine how audiences responded to the source text when it was first produced.

This aspect has led to the development of new theories that find their applicative use

in literary translation and that have the merit of encompassing `the bigger picture'.

One of the more recent theories is that of skopos, outlined in 1984 by the

German theorists of translation studies Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiß. In their

view, the purpose of the text imposes the strategies and methods used in translation.

They consider that communicative or instrumental translation is oriented towards the

target culture, using its conventions and idioms. The text function typically remains

unchanged and the text is not immediately recognised as a translation (Snell-Hornby

(2006: 52-53). The translation of literary texts needs prior investigation primarily

with respect to the cultural, social and historical contexts of the source text, but one

cannot omit the same features for the target text.

It is important to note that the translator performs more than a simple accurate

rendition of the linguistic components of the literary text in the target language.

Besides the obvious constant reference to the contexts mentioned above, in whose

light s/he needs to interpret the ST for, as Foucault (1972) states, the writers are not

in complete control of their material, "there are constraints on the way in which we

use language and organise information" (cited in Mills 1995: 21) the translator is

bound to render the specificities of the text in point of style, considering the lexis,

syntactic structure, and suprasegmental features, but also the semantic and pragmatic

factors.

1.3.

Strategies in literary translation

Naturally, the translation strategies outlined as early as 1958 in Vinay and

Darbelnet's Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais

and further expanded

and developed by Peter Newmark (1988: 81-93)

, Mona Baker (1992)

and many

other translation theorists, and the strategies employed for special cases (fixed

expressions and idioms, e.g., idioms, proverbs, metaphors, similes, etc.) are still valid

in the analysis of a translation and many choices made may be explained with their

help. Nevertheless, if one considers translation as a creative process, it is important to

understand that translators rarely employ these strategies conscientiously.

What they do employ conscientiously, on the other hand, are textual strategies

connected with the spatial and temporal frames of the ST and the TT. The former

refer to domestication versus foreignization (Venuti 1995), while the latter refer to

choices made by the translator in either preserving the language of the time or

adapting it to the contemporary source language. It is less relevant when the literary

text was written. The historical time of the period described in the literary text is of

loan, calque, literal translation, transposition, modulation, total syntagmatic change, adaptation.

word for word, literal, transference (loan word, transcription; transliteration), naturalisation,

synonymy, modulation, equivalence, cultural equivalent, recognised translation, componential

analysis, compensation, expansion, paraphrase, explicitation, omission, notes, additions, glosses.

translation by a more general term (hyperordinate), translation by a more neutral /less expressive

word, translation by cultural substitution, using a loan word + explanation, by paraphrase, omission,

compensation.

greater importance in translation. The particular case under focus here, Louisa May

Alcott's novel, was written in the nineteenth century and the events depicted are

almost contemporary with the writing itself, so the two overlap. The postmodern

revival of histories, however, provides examples of historical novels preserving the

language of the time in which the action is set e.g., Thomas Pynchon's Mason and

Dixon and, in such cases, it is only natural that the strategy of archaisation or

synchronisation (modernisation) should disregard the time of publication.

1.3.1.

Domestication versus foreignisation

As Bassnett and Lefevere (1990, cited in Ulrych 2000: 128) rightfully observe,

translation employs manipulation at the conscious or unconscious level, translators

being able to "wittingly and willingly manipulate the source text to make it serve

their own ends", but they also can be unwilling manipulators due to the ideology that

pervades their culture or language.

In the first chapter of The Translator's Invisibility, Venuti mentions the

German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who argued that "there

are only two methods of translation. Either the translator leaves the author in peace,

as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in

peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him" (in Lefevere 1977:

74). In other words, by admitting that translation can never be completely adequate

to the foreign text, he allows the translator to choose between

a domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text

to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home, and

a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to

sending the reader abroad. (Venuti 1995: 20)

Venuti asserts that a translator's first reaction should be rejecting

domestication, a strategy which seeks conformation to the dominant target-culture

values in order to give the illusion that the target text is actually an `original' rather

than a translation. To achieve this effect, foreign texts undergo significant adaptations

on a number of levels, mainly the language, the plot and the literary forms.

Venuti suggests foreignization as an alternative to domestication because it

"seeks to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation" (Venuti 1995: 20) and it is

designed to make visible the presence of the translator. Along these lines, what needs

pointing out is that, while Venuti is in favour of foreignization as it represents the

translator's resistance to domestication and the invisibility it promotes. He

encourages translators to develop innovative strategies to make their work visible,

signalling their presence in any forms of paratext available, such as prefaces or

footnotes, Schleiermacher considers this method alienating, as it moves the target-

language readers towards the source-text author and not vice versa, giving them the

feeling that they are in the presence of the foreign.

1.3.2.

Archaisation versus synchronisation

Starting from the already obvious assumption that translation is

communication across cultures, the inference is that cultures do not communicate

only synchronically, but also in most cases diachronically. As it is the case with

historical context(s) and evolution, literature(s) or scientific development(s) and

actually in direct relationship to these languages have different pace of change from

one culture to another and, sometimes, even within the same broader culture.

The translator of an obsolete, antiquated literary text must compulsorily

include the question of time in his/her decision-making process, although translation

theories deal significantly less with this issue, giving it over to philosophers of

translation, like Steiner, who stated that "we possess civilisation because we have

learnt to translate out of time" (1998: 31) and posed the question whether the

translation should be synchronic or diachronic ("a vertical or horizontal transfer of

significance" (1998: 47)).

In an extended article, Lauren G. Leighton (1991: 49-61) outlines the theories

of the Soviet linguists and translation practitioners preoccupied with this question of

time. Their views provide two alternatives, i.e., archaisation and modernisation. The

former presupposes the preservation of the temporal imprint of the ST and can be

achieved by resorting to a form of `temporal' domestication, that is to say that the

translator must select from the TL the specificities pertaining to a) the period of time

corresponding to the time of the literary text and b) the period of time corresponding

to the time when the literary text was produced. This approach raises a series of

difficulties firstly, the translator must possess thorough philological knowledge

both in the history of the SL and the TL; secondly, as stated above, languages have

developed differently the translator of Chaucer or Shakespeare into Romanian, for

example, does not have access to the Romanian language used in the fourteenth and

sixteenth centuries; and thirdly, a text that is too antiquated hinders understanding for

modern readers.

Modernisation or synchronisation, on the other hand, involves a more radical

transformation of the text and raises the question of fidelity. Its advocates claim that

a synchronised translation would elicit the same response in the TT modern reader as

it had in those contemporary with the original writing itself. While it may stand valid

for Shakespeare, how does this do for Pynchon, Eco or, say, Sadoveanu?

Despite the latest trends in translation practice, which recommend the

synchronisation of the discourse with the language spoken by the TA at the moment

of the translation, making free use of neologisms or colloquialisms, under the

impression that TA would access the TT more easily, not being hindered by

unfamiliar words or structures

, an archaic touch is more desirable in some cases

For an example of this approach to translation, see Colipc and Stan, `Book Review: Shakespeare,

William, Opere, Piteti: Paralela 45, 2010' in Translation Studies. Retrospective and Prospective

Views 10/2011, pp.85-89.

Indeed, a "totalistic re-creation of archaic language would be unavoidably eccentric"

(Leighton 1991: 52), therefore extreme archaisation should be avoided. Extreme

modernisation, moving history and author towards the reader, is, to a greater extent

than archaisation, unfaithful to the author's intentions. The logical conclusion is that

the translator should strive for placing midway between author and reader; therefore,

the best envisaged strategy is one of balance. The translator should negotiate between

archaic and modern the same way s/he negotiates between meanings, a strategy

which we have termed mitigated synchronisation and which consists in modernising

the discourse as a whole, with occasional insertions of lexical elements of obsolete

usage, just for `remembrance of things past'.

1.3.3.

Standard language versus dialect and idiolect

The last aspect considered in tackling translation strategies for literary translation is

that of the decision-making with regard to the use of language varieties in translation.

As Steiner observed, "the languages that extend over a large physical terrain will

engender regional modes and dialects [...] to the degree that we are almost dealing

with distinct tongues" (1998: 32). However, differences do not come from

geographical considerations exclusively; language is influenced by social, economic,

educational, age or race factors

. The question of dialect and idiolect has

preoccupied many linguists and it was the British linguist Geoffrey Leech who best

defined them as:

varieties of language which are linguistically marked off from other

varieties and which correspond to geographical, class or other

divisions of society. A dialect is thus the particular set of linguistic

English and American literature of the 19

century is a good example in this respect.

Some may include gender in this list; nonetheless, with all the differences observed by Robin Lakoff

(1975) and her followers, the view adopted here is that women's language and men's language cannot

be regarded as two separate dialects.

features which a defined subset of the speech community shares;

idiolect refers, more specifically, to the linguistic `thumbprint' of a

particular person: to the features of speech that mark him off as one

individual from another (2007: 134).

Dialect and idiolect usually represent a great challenge for the translator, who

must understand before embarking in the thorny endeavour of translating them that

they cannot actually render the same effect in a(ny) target language, as they are fully

meaningful and representative for geographical area, social class, race, etc. only in

their original form. Perhaps it is here that the concept of untranslatability applies best,

not in the sense that they cannot be rendered in an approximate form in the TL, but in

the sense that they definitely cannot acquire the equivalent effect that Nida was

advocating.

Discussing Zola's works, the translation theorist Peter Newmark (1988: 212)

advises against the replacement of a French coalminer's dialect with a coalminer's

dialect from Wales and recommends moderation in approaching this specific type of

text in fiction: "a few dropped h's and missing agreements to suggest uneducated

'peasants' would be ineffective. The important thing is to produce naturally slangy,

possibly classless speech in moderation, hinting at the dialect, 'processing' only a

small proportion of the SL dialect words".

However, one of the most comprehensive works in the field, edited by Baker

and Saldanha, Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies (2009: 67), seems to

provide a different view from that expressed above. It includes the translation of

dialects among cultural translations, with heteroglossia, literary allusions, and

culturally specific items like food or architecture. It provides two strategies: one is

that of standardisation (transposition into standard language), recommended, for

pedagogical reasons, for children's literature (2009: 32). This practice is, otherwise,

extended to all types of fiction

, although writers usually employ non-standard styles

with very specific reasons, e.g., "to encode their attitude towards the text's content, to

mark out different voices and /or to structure the text" (2009: 153).

Another strategy is that of using a local dialect. In an article on the translation

of Twain's Huckleberry Finn, B. J. Epstein comments negatively with respect to this

practice:

Because of the storyline, Twain's book has to take place in the

American South, so choosing a Swedish dialect would not have been a

good option. It would probably have been odd for Swedish readers to

read, say, the dialect from the northern region of Lapland while

knowing that the characters were American (2010: 45).

Although this may be, indeed, a little bit awkward for the TT reader, it still

seems a better solution than standardisation of the discourse, a serious alteration and a

betrayal of the author's intention. Baker and Saldanha seem to share this opinion:

"The availability of a particular dialect in the TL may also provide a welcome

opportunity for successful transfer of sociolects in the SL text, which are normally

difficult to capture in translation" (2009: 93). The literary translator, free from the

constraint of using standard language exclusively as it is the case in film translation

must become creative in approaching such a text s/he must bring the text to the

reader therefore domesticate it, s/he must resort to compensation in many cases,

An example of standardisation which clearly affects the writer's intentions:

"I got it fra' Bill Hodgkinsson. `Bill', I says, `tha non wants them three nuts, does ter? arena ter gi'ein

me one for my bit of a lad an' wench?' `I ham, Walter, my lad', `e says, `ta'e which on' em ter's a

mind'."(Lawrence, D.H. 1993. Sons and Lovers, London: Wordsworth Classics, p. 8)

"Am luat-o de la Bill Hodgkinsson. - Bill, îi zic, ce-i fac eu face cât trei nuci. Nu vrei tu s-mi dai una

pentru biatul i fata mea? - i-o dau, Walter, biete, îmi zice, ia care vrei tu, fr suprare."

(Lawrence, D.H. 1991. Fii i amani (translation by Antoaneta Ralian, Bucharest: Miron Publishing,

p. 12).

s/he must go even as far as creating a mixture of standard and non-standard

language

so as to avoid hindering understanding.

Of course, the strategies/ perspectives presented above do not exhaust the

approaches to literary translation whatsoever. Due to the multitude of genres, forms,

and techniques, and experimentation at the level of literary text, the latter's

translation has come to represent each time a singularised intertextual experience of

textual re-creation. Nonetheless, they represent almost compulsory stages in the

interpretation and translation of the literary text. The next subchapter aims at

discussing the same strategies contrastively, in their use in audio-visual translations

for filmic adaptations of literary works.

1.4.

Film Adaptation. Subtitling between Technicality and Artistry

Statistics and common sense have taught us that film, by definition, addresses a larger

audience than literature. The statement is axiomatic to such an extent that it does not

deserve further comments. It triggers, in turn, another self-evident assertion

concerning the [intellectual] quality of this audience, which would be lower than that

of literature.

Since its inception, cinema has relied heavily on literature, partly because, at

the beginning of the twentieth century, it needed a serious warrant in the world of arts

in order to come to be considered art in itself and break the boundaries of vulgarity

and pseudo-artistry. This is the main, but not exclusive reason for the existence of an

impressive list of adaptations of classical literary works during the first decades of the

developing film industry. A certain preference for the Victorian novelists or

Shakespeare is easily noticeable. It was of tremendous importance, in the age of silent

e.g., "'What are ye for?' he shouted.'T' maister's down i't' fowld. Go round by th'end o' t' laith, if

ye went to spake to him'" (Brontë, E. 2012. Wuthering Heights, Amersham: Transatlantic Press, p. 15)

" Ce cai aici? strig el. Stpânu-i jos la vite. D ocol casei i du-te pân' la captu' grajdului dac

vrei s vorbeti cu el" (Brontë, E., 1967. La rscruce de vânturi, translated by Henriette Yvonne Stahl,

Bucharest: Editura pentru literatur, p. 10).

films, for the audience to be previously acquainted with the subject of the production

they watched.

Later on, having gained its autonomy, cinema continued to rely upon

literature, expanding its area of interest, hence the issuing of films made after more

recent novels which had already turned out to be bestsellers see Gone with the Wind

(1939), The Great Gatsby (1926, 1949). However, due to a warranty of success,

producers kept on releasing films inspired by famous masterpieces of world literature.

These adaptation have met with mixed reactions at first, the adaptation

theorists regarded them as blasphemous and not worth watching, heavily affecting the

spectators' perspective on the original literary text. A respected voice in the field, the

film theorist

Robert Stam, reacts against such prejudiced standpoints. Starting from

the idea that this kind of criticism implies that adaptations are "a disservice to

literature" (2005: 2), the critic lists the terms often used by this moralistic approach:

`infidelity', `betrayal', `deformation', `violation', `bastardization', `vulgarization',

and `desecration'."

With the overcoming of moralistic and prejudicial barriers, adaptations have

been considered worth analysing and, in a broader sense of the term, texts in

themselves. Thus, film critics have developed theories dealing exclusively with

adaptations, theories that depart from the "axiomatic superiority of literature to film"

(Stam 2005: 3). Nevertheless, until the full change of perspective in the assessment of

adaptations as there are still voices that characterise them in the negative terms

Stam mentions the hostility towards these productions has relied on an extended list

of arguments. The first argument in favour of the inferiority of adaptations to

literature is the chronological one. Assuming that what is old is necessarily better,

literature is a priori better than cinema. Though false, of course, this is one of the

most common prejudices against adaptations. The second one refers to the rivalry of

arts, perceived as a parricidal rivalry. Springing from literature, the script of the

adaptation "slays the source-text" (2005: 4). The third source of hostility is

iconophobia or "the prejudice against visual arts" (2005: 5), which may threaten the

logos, the written word. A related prejudice, Stam observes, is logophilia or "the

valorisation of the verbal" (2005: 6). Noting that writers tend to reject films based on

literature just as historians reject films based on history, the critic concludes that they

must be suffering from a "nostalgic exaltation of the written word as the privileged

medium of communication" (2005: 6). Another source of hostility Stam identifies is

class prejudice. Film addresses broader categories of intellect than literature and,

through filmic adaptations, literary texts would be vulgarised. Last but not least,

adaptations are `guilty' of parasitism they are simply copies with no individual

grounds.

In direct relation to film theories, translation theories concerning subtitling

have borrowed at least one of the arguments above in imposing a number of

constraints upon film translation, namely the assumption that films address a priori a

broader category of public whose understanding might be compromised if the text is

too long or too intricate.

Subtitling consists of the production of written text superimposed on visual

footage normally near the bottom of the frame while an audio-visual text is

projected, played or broadcast. In so far as it involves a shift from a spoken to a

written medium, subtitling has been defined as a `diasemiotic' or `intermodal' form

of audiovisual translation (Gottlieb 1997 in Baker and Saldanha 2009: 14).

Although the field of audio-visual translation is a dynamic one, the theories

which deal with it are rather scarce and convergent in a set of rules which any

translator /subtitler should abide by. Time is of the essence in subtitling the written

words must overlap the spoken discourse and must also remain on the screen

sufficient seconds for an average reader to be able to grasp the whole message,

between 5 and 8 seconds per frame. The translation should be that of the actual

utterances, not the translation of the script. The process of subtitling consists in three

individual stages: listening and interpretation of the utterances, their translation and,

then, an editing process in which the utterances must be condensed so as to fit the

space constraints. There should be no more than two titles (lines) per frame (three is

allowed only as an exception) and each title should have no more than 36 characters,

including spaces. The line should represent a coherent logical unit (Praisler, 2009:

113).

Given the sentence: "The officer informed us that a robbery had taken place

there", it is advisable to split it as "the officer informed us | that a robbery had taken

place there" and not as "the officer informed us that a robbery | had taken place

there". If the spoken utterance is too long and cannot be condensed so as to fit in one

frame, the subtitler may split it into two frames, using suspension dots at the

beginning of the second frame, to mark the fact that the sentence has started on a

previous frame, e.g., "The officer informed us that a robbery had taken place there

and that we were advised to leave the perimeter":

Frame 1

The officer informed us

that a robbery had taken place there

Frame 2

... and that we were advised

to leave the perimeter.

As a rule, the lines must be centred, the fonts used must be legible (Times

New Roman, Arial) and of reasonable size. It is only advisable to use italicised fonts

when the audio text is narrated (e.g., a letter, a diary page, etc.). If two characters

speak a small amount of text which can be rendered in one single frame, dialogue

dashes are used.

e.g.

- Have you seen that sign?

- No, I haven't.

Unlike literary translations, subtitles rely to a great extent on paraphrasing,

condensation, and omission. The greatest challenge of the subtitler is that of

rendering as accurately as possible the spoken utterances within the indicated number

of characters per frame. To this effect, after having translated the whole spoken

discourse, the translator should `operate' on the TT. Further, we shall provide some

examples of such reduction techniques, relying on the summary of Ivarsson 1992 and

Gambier 1998 in Praisler 2009: 110-119:

The sentence structure should be kept simple (no excessive use of subordinate

clauses, a minimum of digressions, breaks into readily digestible chunks):

e.g.

I'm being told, at this late hour that he, the villain who destroyed my

happiness and took the lives of my dearly beloved, was seen woe betides

him! at your soiree yesterday night.

The translation:

Mi s-a spus, târziu în noapte, c el, ticlosul care mi-a distrus fericirea i i-a

ucis pe cei pe care îi iubeam a fost vzut blestemat fie-i numele! la serata

ta de asear.

The condensed subtitle:

Am auzit târziu c ticlosul

care mi-a ucis familia (1)

...a fost asear la serata ta. (2)

The imprecation "woe betides him!" can be either omitted altogether or, if important

for the character's state of mind, isolated as a separate sentence. In general, shouts,

cries, curses, etc. may be omitted. This is also the case for nouns in the Vocative,

interjections or repetitions and false starts. Profanities should be toned down, not

censored.

e.g.

Erm...Chris, you, goddam' son of a b[....] come here... I'm telling you, come

as quickly as possible!

can be reasonably reduced to

Vino încoace mai repede, nemernicule!,

as the viewer of the film grasps the whole meaning from the character's intonation

and/or furious looks.

Another aspect important in audio-visual translation is that the translator

/subtitler should not overlook the visual and the other modes. "Audio-visual texts are

multimodal inasmuch as their production and interpretation relies on the combined

deployment of a wide range of semiotic resources or `modes'. Major meaningmaking

modes in audio-visual texts include language, image, music, colour and perspective"

(Baker and Saldanha 2009: 13). For that reason, it is superfluous and space-

consuming to mention the vase, the shelf, and the flowers in the subtitle of a sentence

such as: Put the flowers in the vase on the shelf! if the objects appear on screen.

Instead, a good subtitle would be: "Pune-le acolo!", the deixes replacing the three

nouns in the original sentence, as the viewer has already seen the objects. If it does

not happen too often, it is only because the subtitlers ignore the film altogether and

focus on the script exclusively.

Things tend to get more complicated when dealing with a filmic adaptation of

a literary text. The translator/subtitler should bear in mind that, while adaptations may

address a broader audience who may or may not understand the subtleties of a literary

text, they contain, more often than not, whole chunks of the dialogues in the novel.

The scriptwriters may have or may have not simplified them if they have, all the

rules above apply as for any other film. If not, the translator/subtitler faces a dual

challenge: on the one hand, s/he is bound to abide by the spatial and temporal

constraints, that is to render the subtitles in the 5 to 8 seconds and maximum 37

characters with spaces, but, on the other hand, s/he must operate on a text that

preserves the intricacies of a literary text. Therefore, the translation /subtitling for

filmic adaptations seems a more challenging endeavour than that of a film with

original script.

In such a case, the translator/subtitler should consider the strategies for

literary translation along with the subtitling rules and select only the ones appropriate

for the two different text types.

In terms of Venuti's `domestication/foreignization' dichotomy, the subtitling

process typically leads to the domestication of the source dialogue and the effacement

of the translator (Ulrych 2000). For example, one can only rarely insert `notes' in a

subtitle. If the spoken text is a famous quotation and the space permits, the subtitler

may insert a parenthetical note with the name of the author cited. In the case of

another foreign language used at some point in the film, most often subtitles in the

language of the film are superimposed and the translator should translate those, not

preserve the lines as they were uttered.

As for the strategy concerning time, the translator/subtitler should normally

resort to modernisation of the discourse, fearing that understanding of the viewer

might be even more hindered than that of the reader which brings us back to one of

the critiques addressed to film, namely class prejudice and vulgarisation of the

literary. However, if the scriptwriters deliberately used an archaic language to

enliven their characters, they had in mind a purportedly cultured audience able to

understand a more archaic language. Why should the translator/subtitler assume that

the TL speakers are, by default, less intelligent than the SL speakers? Of course, as it

is the case with literature, archaisation should not be exaggerated, but moderate, only

to give a glimpse, a flavour of old acquired mainly through lexical choices and

syntactic inversions.

Further, an example from Kenneth Branagh's adaptation for Hamlet shall be

provided in order to show how the aforesaid moderated archaisation functions at the

subtitling level. It is necessary to stress that the adaptation preserves the

Shakespearean lines without attempting at synchronising the discourse. The reason

why this specific text has been chosen is that it is one of the most famous archaic

texts still in circulation, a text which has been translated into Romanian many times,

in many variants, from very archaic to exaggeratedly modern. At this point, emphasis

being laid on the subtitles, it was interesting to check which of two strategies was

employed.

To be or not to be.

That is the question.

Whether tis nobler in the mind to

suffer the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune or to take arm

against the sea of troubles and, by

opposing, end them?

To die, to sleep... No more!

And by a sleep to say we end the

heartache and the thousand natural

shocks that flesh is heir to. 'Tis a

consummation devoutly to be wished.

(Branagh, K.,

Hamlet, 1996: 1:30:00-

44)

A fi sau a nu fi...

Aceasta-i întrebarea.

E oare mai de laud s rabzi în cuget |a

sorii grele pratii i sgei

sau braul s-l ridici asupra mrii de griji

| i s le curmi?

S mori, s dormi. Atât!

i, prin somn | s curmi durerea din

inim

i mulimea de izbeliti menite crnii.

E o încheiere |ce merit s-o râvneti.

(original DVD subtitle)

As the example above shows, the subtitle text has been `adorned' with a few

slightly obsolete terms: cuget, a curma, izbeliti, a meni, a râvni and the general

effect is acquired despite the lack of the iambic pentameter, which would be much

too difficult to attempt in a subtitle. The practical application in the present paper will

show the extent to which using archaic words and syntactic structures for the

adaptation of a nineteenth century novel has been considered reasonable.

The last aspect dealt with in the subchapter dedicated to literary translations

concerned the use of dialect and idiolect in translation. In this respect, the theorists of

subtitling are stricter: one should not use dialects and idiolects in subtitling, as they

are difficult to render in writing and even more difficult to read within the given time

frame. This implies a great amount of loss, especially in cases when different

idiolects are employed, for it annuls the equivalent effect completely. An illustrative

example from the film Gone with the Wind (1939) was chosen and presented in

parallel with the corresponding lines in the novel. The choice for this novel and its

filmic adaption lies, on the one hand, in the linguistic specificities of the former,

which employs dialect to a great extent, and, on the other hand, in the fact that its

time and setting correspond to those of the novel/adaptation analysed in the present

paper.

Where are you going without your

shawl and the night air coming?

And how come you didn't ask them

gentlemen to supper?

You got no more manners than a field

hand.

After me and Miss Ellen done labour

with you!

Come on in before you catch your

death of dampness!

I'm going to wait for Pa' to come

home from the Wilkes!

Come on in here!

Come on!

(Gone with the Wind DVD, 2004,

08:22-41, original English subtitles)

Dr Scarlett! De ce eti fr al acum

|când începe rcoarea nopii?

De ce nu i-ai invitat pe domni la

mas?

Ai maniere de ranc.

Cu toat silina pe care ne-am dat-o

|dra Ellen i cu mine.

Dr Scarlett, intr în cas!| S nu te

îmbolnveti de friguri!

Nu! Îl atept pe papa | s se întoarc de

la familia Wilkes!

Intr înuntru!

Hai odat!

(Gone with the Wind DVD, 2004,

08:22-41, original Romanian subtitles)

The original lines of Mammy in the novel, contrasted with the English

subtitles above, prove that indeed dialect is overlooked in subtitling:

"Is de gempmum gone? Huccome you din' ast dem ter stay fer

supper, Miss Scarlett? Ah done tole Poke ter lay two extry plates

fer dem. Whar's yo' manners?"

"Oh, I was so tired of hearing them talk about the war that I

couldn't have endured it through supper, especially with Pa

joining in and shouting about Mr. Lincoln."

"You ain' got no mo' manners dan a fe'el han', an' after Miss

Ellen an' me done labored wid you. An' hyah you is widout yo'

shawl! An' de night air fixin' ter set in! Ah done tole you an' tole

you `bout gittin' fever frum settin' in de night air wid nuthin' on

yo' shoulders. Come on in de house, Miss Scarlett." (Mitchell, M.,

Gone with the Wind, 2002: 20).

As the examples above have shown, moderated archaisation seems

appropriate in some cases even in subtitling. However, Branagh's Hamlet is a special

case in point: usually the scriptwriters adapt texts as old as this one into a more

modern discourse, which simplifies the subtitler's task. Generally, the recourse to this

type of discourse is not recommended, for it becomes wearisome for the viewer, as it

happens for the reader in the case of literature. As for the dialectal specificities, it has

been proven that they are overlooked even at the stage of the intralingual and

intersemiotic translation, which renders their presence completely unjustified in

subtitles in other languages than that of the film.

To sum up, when subtitling a filmic adaptation of a literary text, literariness

should be preserved at least partially if it is present in the film, while abiding at the

same time by the rules imposed on audio-visual translation. The translators are bound

to combine two different techniques, one coming from the area of translation as art

and the other from the domain of functional translation.

CHAPTER II

From Context to Text: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

This chapter sets out to discuss Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, the novel which

served as hypotext for the film in focus, in its original context of production and

reception, that is, in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the

conclusion of peace after the Civil War between North and South. Although Judith

Fetterley (1979) and other feminist critics claimed that the Civil War should rather be

regarded as a metaphor of chaos and anomy in Alcott's works, the years of secession

left their imprints upon people's mentality, irrespective of their side, while the long,

fratricidal war took women out of their domestic haven and made them perform

activities that had been unconceivable before. In turn, this led to their gaining a sense

of independence and emancipation, manifest at all levels of cultural and societal

interaction, literature included. This is the reason why this chapter begins with a

historicist account of the period, focusing primarily on women's role during those

times. The analysis then narrows down from context to text, to the novel itself, more

precisely to the representations of femininity it provides. Since the paper has

essentially proposed to discuss translation issues, the final part of this chapter brings

samples of literary translation from the novel, carried out using the strategies outlined

in the theoretical chapter, with respect to the overarching context of production, but

also considering the context of reception.

2.1. Women's role in nineteenth century America

One century after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence (1776), the

United States of America were still paying tribute to England in what people's

mentality and day by day life were concerned. This is precisely why historians

designate a large period of the nineteenth century with the term Victorianism,

although other terms (e.g., the Gilded Age for the final part of the century) are largely

in circulation exactly in order to gain cultural autonomy.

While borrowing Victorian cultural aspects, the Americans in the area known

as New England

were among the first to develop movements in literature,

philosophy and education, also playing a significant role in the abolition of slavery.

Nonetheless, despite the cultural and industrial growth and the urbanisation of the

area, women's role remained essentially domestic, as in any other part of America.

The British writer Francis Trollope noted as early as 1832 that women were

constantly relegated to their private, domestic space, while the men were enjoying

various distractions:

In America, with the exception of dancing, which is almost wholly

confined to the unmarried of both sexes, all the enjoyments of the men

are found in the absence of the women. They dine, they play cards,

they have musical meetings, they have suppers, all in large parties but

all without women

. Were it not that such is the custom, it is

impossible but that they would have ingenuity enough to find some

expedient for sparing the wives and daughters of the opulent the sordid

offices of household drudgery which they almost all perform in their

families (Trollope 1832; digitalised 2003 ch. 14).

America developed a true "cult of domesticity", which, as Dorothy W.

Hartman observes, remained "strongly entrenched" until the end of the nineteenth

century in rural areas. "The beliefs embodied in this `Cult' gave women a central, if

The northeast area of the United States (Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut

and New Hampshire). The setting of the first volume of Little Women is a small, unnamed town in

Massachusetts and Alcott's biographers have identified it with Concord, MA, the town in which she

lived during her adolescence years.

Perhaps the literary meetings held by the March girls, in which they assume the roles of male

characters from Dickens's Pickwick Papers spring from this very state of facts women's literary

circles must have seemed unconceivable.

outwardly passive, role in the family. Women's God-given role [...] was as wife and

mother, keeper of the household, guardian of the moral purity of all who lived

therein" (online, not dated). Evidence shows that they received education, however,

this was mainly pursued in local schools or simply at home. They rarely worked

outside their own houses. Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's mother and the one who

inspired the construction of the character Mrs March from Little Women was one of

the first documented social workers, according to the website www.

louisamayalcott.org.

Also known as "the cult of true womanhood", women's conduct presupposed

four aspects: piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. These virtues were

praised in women's magazines, seminaries and didacticist pieces of literature (a

category to which Little Women belongs, at least the surface level). Barbara Welter

(1966) provides a few quotations from periodicals, which are representative for the

mentality of the time: "in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her

cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper and

humility of mind are required from her" (The Young Lady's Book) (139); "a wife

should occupy herself only with domestic affairs wait till your husband confides to

you those of a high importance and do not give your advice until he asks for it"

(Lady's Token) (140). From these quotations, it becomes apparent that being

independent and having opinions was regarded as utterly unfeminine, probably by

men and women altogether. The historian does not specify to which gender belonged

the authors of the articles she quotes, but the addressees were, most certainly, women

who had to learn their place and `make the most' from their education in order to

become `respected' appendages to their husbands. It took a war for women to unchain

themselves from these yokes of gilded slavery in which the society was keeping

them.

The tormented first half of the 1860s brings about a fratricidal war between

the abolitionist North and the secessionist slave states from the South. The Civil War,

known as the most dramatic event in the history of the United States, lasted from

1861 to 1865 and ended up with the victory of the Union (the north states).

Inevitably, this war took women out of the comfort of their home. Prefacing the

discussion upon women's literature of that time, Elaine Showalter (2010: 155)

remarks:

Warfare redistributed some of men's traditional power to women, and

brought women's conflicts over their roles to the surface, as

conventional rules of feminine decorum were suspended, and women

on the home front took over many of the jobs left behind them or

became teachers or military nurses.

During

the

Reconstruction

(1865 1877), women had already overcome the

prejudice of "true womanhood" and "the cult of domesticity" and they were more and

more interested in acquiring different goals, like higher education and suffrage. The

number of women writers increases, although, as Laura Laffrado remarks, "virtually

all women encountered a range of arbitrary barriers in their attempts to write and

publish their work" (2009: 153).

Within this context, Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of a Transcendentalist

father and a suffragist mother, herself a member of the American Women Suffrage

Association (Showalter 2010: 196) and an advocate of women's creativity and

independence, publishes the Bildungsroman Little Women, which makes use of many

of the precepts presented above. Contextually dependant and apparently abiding by

the ways of the nineteenth century woman, the novel actually subverts the patriarchal

teachings of its time and the next subchapter aims at providing evidence of this

assertion.

The Reconstruction Era especially concerns the rebel southern states; however, it may be regarded

as having impact upon the entire American people.

2.2. `Victorianism overseas' or proto-feminism in Louisa May Alcott's Little

Women

It has become an understatement that Louisa May Alcott's `conduct handbook' for

nineteenth century American young girls, Little Women, is more than a simple novel

belonging to the category of children's literature. Outside the canon, unlike her

contemporary (and source of inspiration), Harriet Beecher-Stowe, whose Uncle

Tom's Cabin has `made it' to the area of `grand literature' due to a political/-ised

subject and approach, Louisa May Alcott has arrested the attention of feminist

criticism starting with the 1960s, giving birth to endless debates upon her

representation(s) of femininity. The two opposing attitudes from the title of this

subchapter are, in fact, the directions adopted by feminist critics in regard to this

novel. Little Women is either regarded as a piece of didacticist and moralising

literature, strongly influenced by British Victorianism in general and by Charles

Dickens in particular (an influence which cannot be denied) or, on the contrary, as a

feminist subversion of the patriarchal values of America during and after the Civil

War, or, in Judith Fetterley's words (cited in Grasso 1998: 180), an "overt message of

domestic capitulation and covert message of feminist revolt".

The accusations that Little Women has to stand start from the very tittle,

considered `belittling' for women (as a parenthesis, the Romanian translation of the

feature film title, Fiicele doctorului March, seems much more belittling and

patriarchal, for it brings to the foreground a male character, whose importance is not

stressed as such in the novel or film. Not to mention that it invites to psychoanalytical

insights). More justified accusations concern the roles allotted to women. In

children's books, as Sara Mills (1995: 128) observes, women are portrayed in certain

stereotypical ways: "housewives and mothers, only capable of certain actions, such as

washing the dishes and caring for children, and female children seem to be restricted

to certain actions, such as helping mother and playing with dolls". Although Alcott

seems not to fully abide by these stereotypes, anticipating modernism in the sense

that Little Women is rather a Künstlerroman than a Bildungsroman (this traditional

view upon the novel is somehow refuted by the importance laid upon the becoming of

Jo and Amy as artists), the resolution in marriage for three of the protagonists is

observant of the fairy-tales rules, which, as Joanna Russ (1983) notes from a

Formalist perspective, allow women to perform very limited tasks within the text:

The roles that women characters have are determined by stereotypes of

what women are like: concerned with emotion rather than action,

relegated to the private sphere rather than the public sphere, seen as

the appendages of males rather than characters in their own right (cited

in Mills 1995: 130).

In fact, the authoress herself seems saddened by her novel's

dénouement, for,

instead of allowing her alter-ego, Jo, to remain `the literary spinster' she was, she

feels constrained to meet the readers' horizon of expectations:

[...] publishers won't allow authors finish up as they like but insist on

having people married off in wholesale manner that much afflicts me.

Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic

young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should

marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn't dare to refuse and out of

perversity went and made a funny match for her. I expect vials of

wrath to be poured upon my head, but I rather enjoy the prospects

(Alcott in Myerson and Shealy 1995: 124).

Alcott's mischievous "funny match" is Professor Bhaer, a German immigrant

who, unfortunately, despite his culture and understanding for the great literature and

philosophy, led Jo back to the ways of domesticity she had broken with when she

approached literature as a profession. While the end of the novel can be regarded as

abidance to the rules of the context of production on Alcott's part, a second

interpretation can be that the authoress, a spinster herself, considers marriage as

damaging for the creative spirits.

2.2.1. Representation of femininity

The construction of the character Jo is a problematic issue in the ambivalent

reception of Little Women from a feminist perspective. While she is indeed a writer,

an independent, unaffected young girl (and woman, in the second part) and an

embodiment of the "American female myth" (Bedell cited in Grasso 1998: 178), she

is, on the other hand, America's most famous tomboy

(Sarah Klein; Karin Quimby;

Michelle Ann Abate, etc.). Her name and aspirations are rather masculine:

It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys' games and

work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a

boy. And it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with

Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a pokey old woman!

(Alcott 1989: 3).

Hence, Alcott seems to challenge again the very femininity of her most

prominent character, partly subverting the idea of independent and creative

womanhood. "Perversity" or not, Jo's marriage and her subsequent transformation

from a woman of letters into an adoptive mother of eight boys come, unfortunately, to

"For by eschewing the feminine and expressing masculine identifications and desires, the tomboy,

by definition, points up that such categories as male and female, or masculine and feminine, are

indeterminate and unstable. The tomboy, in other words, exemplifies that the notion of gender identity

is not anchored to any secure, incontestable foundations [...] By refusing to learn and enact femininity,

the tomboy destabilizes gender as a `natural' construct" (Quimby 2003: 1). The queer theorist

discusses Jo's tomboyism having in sight a `protolesbian' girlhood, which is not justified from the

textual perspective. The translator's advantage in performing critical inquiry is the very intimate

relationship she has established with the text in the translation process, and, in this case, no textual

evidence that would support Quimby's assertion could be identified. It is undeniable, on the other

hand, that tomboyism is indeed a disruption in the `natural' (read imposed by patriarchy) gender order

and from this respect, Quimby's definition is the one of best available.

reinforce the patriarchal status imposed upon women in the nineteenth century. Elaine

Showalter notes that "any consideration of Victorian criticism would turn up

evidence of the view that motherhood and writing are incompatible" (2003: 68). She

quotes from an 1850 review of

Charlotte Brontë

's Shirley to support her statement:

the grand function of woman [...] is, and must ever be, Maternity. [...]

the greater portion of their time, thoughts, interests ought to be, and

generally are, centred in the care and training of their children. But

how could such occupations consort with the intense and unremitting

studies which seared the eyeballs of Milton [...]?

Jo March seems to have been designed to inscribe herself in the gallery of

great feminine literary figures together with Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse or,

perhaps, Jane Eyre. Similarly with the `destinies' of these characters, Jo's ending in

romance must be `forgiven' by radical feminists on the account of the historical

context of these novels, which leads again to the territory of the contemporary

readers' `horizon of expectations'. This brings once again the discussion in the sphere

of the context, which cannot be overlooked when discussing (any type of) discourse.

Among the first theorists who stressed its importance, Michel Foucault (1972)

advocated to "grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine

its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other

statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it

excludes", in other words, to acknowledge the emitter's constraints in what language

and organisation of information was concerned. Not even in the case of literature is

one `allowed' to write outside his/her contextual appropriateness without the risk of

being labelled `deviant'. And whilst "there are two places in culture where you can

say outrageous things, like, if you're a woman, `I don't think I'm a woman', or if

you're a man, `I don't think I'm a man' without being carted off: and one is literature

and the other one is psychoanalysis" (Jacqueline Rose 2010: 77) may stand valid for

our times or even for Jo's tomboyish statements, for that matter no one should

reasonably accuse Louisa May Alcott of a certain degree of conformity in the

construction of her most accomplished and beloved character.

Analysing Little Women from the queer theory perspective, Karin Quimby

rightfully observes that "while Little Women offers up a whole family of girls,

evidence widely confirms that `most readers love Little Women because they love Jo

March'" (2003: 1). This is partly due to the fact that Jo is present almost all the time

and she is constantly spoken of and spoken to, although there are plenty of chapters in

which one or another of her sisters is in focus. Willingly or not, Jo March is

undoubtedly the main character of Little Women.

Nevertheless, the present undertaking is set upon analysing various

representations of femininity, therefore, before discussing the novel's bidirectional

translation interlingual and intersemiotic (Jakobson cited in Johnson 1984: 421)

into Romanian and into film, respectively, it seems appropriate to present the other

women characters in the novel, namely Jo's sisters, Meg, Amy and Beth, and their

mother, Marmee.

Amy, "a regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her

shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of

her manners" (Alcott 1989: 4) is the youngest of the four sisters and, apparently, the

least affected by patriarchal impositions. She is an artist, she is given the chance to

travel to Europe and she is not confined into a restrictive marriage. Although this

female `sole purpose' is achieved in her case as well, her marriage to Laurie is

described as partnership: "My wife and I respect ourselves and one another too much

ever to tyrannize or quarrel" says Laurie (Alcott 1989: 447) when asked who rules

their marriage an idea that could seem daring at the time. Therefore, the constitutive

elements in the construction of the character Amy seem to suggest a modern heroine

with a will and a way. She is, on the other hand, a snobbish young lady very much

concerned with appropriateness, with the `ways of the world' of her time and, despite

the advantages she enjoys, she depicts a rather traditional philosophy on life in

general and the role of the woman in particular: "You can go through the world with

your elbows out and your nose in the air, and call it independence, if you like. That's

not my way" (Alcott 1989: 259).

In point of style, Amy seems rewarding to Alcott, for the character makes

extensive use of a sophisticated language that she does not fully master in her early

adolescence (the first part of the novel), which determines the occurrence of an

idiolect in its own right otherwise, a wearisome task for the translator. The missing

years in the chronology of the novel briefly accounted for in the first chapter of

Good Wives

seem to have `helped' the character grow for Amy in the second

part of the novel does not preserve much of the spoiled girl in the first half. Either

that, or a character construction flaw. Nonetheless, from a feminist perspective, Amy

is, at times, more accomplished in her femininity than Jo.

Feminists critique seems more justified with the other two sisters, Meg and

Beth, true victims of patriarchy. At the beginning of the novel, Margaret (Meg), the

eldest sister, resembles Amy a worldly young lady frustrated by the financial

shortcomings of her family. Once married, Meg becomes a feminist nightmare: the

housewife interested only in pleasing her husband and raising her children.

Like most other young matrons, Meg began her married life with the

determination to be a model housekeeper. John should find home a

paradise, he should always see a smiling face, should fare sumptuously

every day, and never know the loss of a button (Alcott 1989: 273).

Good Wives was published in 1869 as a sequel to Little Women, its publication being pre-

conditioned in the last lines of the first volume: "So the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.

Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of this domestic drama

called Little Women" (1989: 235). The modern editions of the novel usually comprise both volumes

under the title Little Women.

Alcott's attitude towards this character is one of pity and bitter irony, this is

why she dedicates to Meg a whole chapter entitled On the shelf. Inserted between

Jo's literary successes (rendered in diary form) and Amy's travel accounts written as

epistolary novel, Margaret's domestic tribulations seem all the more pathetic. Louisa

May Alcott is not as radical as to advocate spinsterhood or to rebuke the institution of

(patriarchal) marriage in its entirety; however, she passes judgements such as:

In America, as everyone knows, girls early sign the declaration of

independence, and enjoy their freedom with republican zest, but the

young matrons usually abdicate with the first heir to the throne and go

into a seclusion almost as close as a French nunnery, though by no

means as quiet. Whether they like it or not, they are virtually put upon

the shelf as soon as the wedding excitement is over (Alcott 1989: 388)

(my emphasis).

All are clearly indicative of her position. Although Meg's marriage is presented as

happy and fulfilling, the text provides extensive evidence of the irony employed.

Beth's development in Little Women resembles what Virginia Woolf was to

describe as the practice of "killing the angel in the house", a "part of the occupation

of a woman writer" (1931, publ. 1942). The kindest, the most faithful, the least

ambitious and the most silenced of the March girls, Beth's character does not have

much depth, which may be partly justifiable by the stereotypical role ascribed to her

within a patriarchal patterning of "women as being emotional, irrational, weak,

nurturing and submissive" (Tyson 1999: 83). To some extent, all the sisters are

embodiments of the "good girl", accepting sooner or later their traditional gender

role. From this patriarchal perspective, Beth is `the best girl'. Woolf's description of

the `angel in the house' suits Beth perfectly, which proves the stereotypical

construction:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She

was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life.

She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if

there was a draught she sat in it - in short she was so constituted that

she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to

sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all - I

need not say it - she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief

beauty, her blushes, her great grace. (Woolf, 1942)

Why should such `perfection' vanish? Virginia Woolf `kills' hers because of

the angel's advice to be flattery and sympathetic, because the angel seems to impose

on her values allegedly pertaining to the domain of womanhood which she does not

want to embrace. But why does Alcott kill her angel in the house? Beth is not named

as such, but her description in Jo's poem is self-explanatory: "Sitting patient in the

shadow | Till the blessed light shall come, | A serene and saintly presence | Sanctifies

our troubled home" (Alcott 1989: 417). Looking into Alcott's diary from 1858,

around the death of her sister, Betty, one reads: "I wrote some lines last night on Our

Angel in the House" (97) and the poem itself the same naïve and faulty lines

incorporated in the novel. Look no further, the novel is so permeated with

autobiographical elements and the death of Betty/Beth is so real in the mind of the

authoress that any accusation of abiding by the patriarchal rules or, on the contrary,

any search for some subversive feminist practice would be downright ludicrous.

If the construction of the characters for two of the March girls, namely Jo and

Amy, may bring in glimpses of modernity and feminine emancipation (enhanced to a

great extent in the 1994 filmic production), the other two and their mother are

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

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Master's Programme in Translation and Interpretation Studies

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Oana-Celia Gheorghiu (Author)

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2015

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253

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9783954894604

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American literature Little Women adaptation feminism subtitling femininity film studies Louisa May Alcott literary translation

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Oana-Celia Gheorghiu (Author)

, 2015, From 19th Century Femininity in Literature to 20th Century Feminism on Film: Discourse Translation and Adaptation, Hamburg, Bedey Media GmbH, https://www.anchor-publishing.com/document/303844

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