Beyond conformity and empowerment: Redefining Jo March in early Chinese translations of Little Women

Yuan Tao and Dechao Li
Dalian University of Technology | Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Jo March, the protagonist of the classic Little Women, has often been viewed as a ‘creative intellectual’ in pursuit of a literary career. While Jo has attracted scholarly attention across different disciplines, research on her portrayal in early Chinese translations during the New Culture Movement (a critical period marked by the introduction of Western ideologies in China) is limited. Adopting Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla’s (2017) characterization model, this article aims to investigate how the iconoclastic protagonist was reconstructed in the two earliest Chinese translations. It utilizes a mixed model that encompasses textual aspects of narratorial and translatorial control, self-/other-presentation, and explicitness/implicitness, demonstrating that Jo was portrayed as a demure lady in the 1920s and as a masculine woman in the 1930s, shaped by prevailing ideologies, poetics, and patronage. Integrating narratology and cognitive stylistics within Descriptive Translation Studies, the research sheds light on the dynamic interplay between cultural ideologies and literary representations.

Publication history

Date received: 20 July 2023

Date accepted: 18 June 2025

Published online: 14 July 2025

Table of contents

From a narratological perspective, characterization is the process of attributing personal traits to fictional figures. According to Jannidis (2009, 15), it is as important as character itself because it contributes to “the overall structural coherence” of a narrative. Margolin (1983, 7) further specifies that the “richness of texture, individuality and specific detail” in characterization help readers establish a connection between the fictional world and reality. Extensive research has been conducted on the characterization of individual or group protagonists in various forms of storytelling, including plays, TV dramas, prose narratives, and translations (cf., Montoro 2012; Culpeper 2014; Li 2019; Zeven and Dorst 2021).

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