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This paper explores the Deleuzean concept of desire in Terence Rattigan’s Cause Célèbre. In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari subvert Freudian concept of desire and redefine it in a perspective of positive power to revolutionize the conventional society through deterritorialization. Rattigan’s adaptation of real case of Alma Rattenbury centers on criticizing twentieth-century British society where woman’s expression of desire is regarded as obscene according to Oedipus ideology. Alma, as an anti-oedipus being, resists the Oedipus desire and produces its own desire independently, therefore destructing the conventional Oedipus structure within society. By adding the story of the Davenport family as a sub plot and reflecting his personal life to them, Rattigan brings attention to the social tendency to suppress desire and hopes to escape from the repressive social orders. Rattigan’s autobiographical character, Tony, represents Rattigan’s suppressed homosexual desire in his boyhood. As Deleuze argues that deterritorialization of desire leads social change, Tony’s deterritorialization brings about a change in Alma’s trial result.
