Beyond conformity and empowerment

Abstract 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.