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.
