Jitta's Atonement: The Birth of Psychoanalysis and "The Fetters of the Feminine Psyche"

—The last time we were at the theatre he discussed the play with me. It was a play about love.
—Well, what else would a play be about?

—Bernard Shaw, Jitta's Atonement (1922)

Every man who records his illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology which the world still waits for . . .

—Bernard Shaw, Epistle Dedicatory, Man and Superman (1903)

Bernard Shaw's writing of Jitta's Atonement raises many questions, not all of which can be addressed in this essay. We know it as an adaptation rather than a literal translation of a German play, Frau Gittas Sühne (1920), by Shaw's Viennese translator, Siegfried Trebitsch.¹ Bernard Dukore has compared the two versions and demonstrated how different Shaw's version is in its emphases: "He alters and embroiders every scene, every page, virtually every line" (Dukore 204).² Where Shaw claimed in the preface that "the variations" of his translation "affect, not the story itself, but only the key in which it ends" (5:723), Dukore shows that Shaw's changes are spread over the entire play.³

The title refers to the atonement that non-Shavian morality, especially that of romantic drama, requires in cases of marital infidelity. In this case the infidelity is the result not of a casual affair but of a love neither partner had ever found in their respective marriages. Unusually for a Shaw play, the question of love occupies center stage, as made clear by Jitta and her lover, Bruno, in Act I:

JITTA. I love you: I love you: we are alive, not dead: you are living with my life as well as your own: your blood surges to be with mine: you cannot die while I hold on to you fast. All the rest is an uneasy dream that means nothing: this is love; and love is life made irresistible.

BRUNO [carried away] Life: yes this is life, and this [he kisses her eyes], and this [he kisses her lips]. What a fool I was with my iron resolutions! one throb of your breast, one touch of your lips; and where are they? (5:743)

And in Act II, when Jitta finally confesses her adultery to her husband, Alfred Lenkheim:

LENKHEIM. You and he were lovers?

JITTA [proudly] Yes: you have found the right word at last. Lovers. (5:768)

And a little later:

JITTA [earnestly] . . . it was too strong for us.

LENKHEIM. What was too strong for you?

JITTA. Love. You don't understand love.

(5:770)

The question in Jitta's Atonement becomes: How can the consequences of this phenomenon of the irruption of adulterous love in the context of social and personal relations, and of marriage in particular, be worked out? Or what form should Jitta's atonement and that of her lover, Bruno, take? But it is not as simple as that, and a more immediate question is raised that might set us on the way to answering these others: Why did Shaw set out to "translate" this play?

The most obvious and best-known answer lies in the times. In post-World War I Vienna, conditions were desperate, even for such comfortably well-off people as Trebitsch and his wife. To ameliorate their position with some foreign currency, Shaw thought that a translation by him of the latest play by his German translator might, if produced, raise some much-needed cash in Britain and the United States that could be then channeled to the Trebitschs in Vienna. But given the anti-German feelings following the war, even this plan of using the commercial currency of Shaw's name was optimistic. Still, an interrogation of the differences between Anglo-American and German-Austrian sensibilities might have seemed highly appropriate to Shaw in the context of the war and its misunderstandings between cultures, and the situation...