The Sphinx Factor in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of human behavior and choice as represented in two British stage plays: Terrance Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978). Written for different socio-economic and historical contexts, both plays feature triangular relationships in which the female protagonists respond to their failed marriages by engaging in unsuccessful extramarital affairs, eventually developing resilience and thus recovering hope from failure. The constant tension between the intertwined human and animal factors in these marital and extramarital relationships exemplifies what the Chinese scholar Nie Zhenzhao calls the “Sphinx factor.” This comparative study discusses the significance of the Sphinx factor in these two works, proposing that Rattigan and Pinter use their dramatic observations of society to show how the animal instinct leads to extramarital affairs, and how human intellect, in turn, retrieves rationality and an added sense of awakening. Particular attention is paid to how each heroine acquires self-recognition in the process of grappling with these opposing psychological and evolutionary inheritances. The intricate depictions of marital infidelity, the politics of betrayal and self-deception, the irrationality of love, and the need for female self-knowledge in these works provide an ongoing social commentary on the human condition. The Deep Blue Sea and Betrayal offer an important lesson for the ethically compromised worlds in which they were written that remains relevant to this day.