The garden in “The Door in the Wall” symbolizes a place of perfect contentment and peace, an escape from the competition and vanity of everyday life. The garden, lush and expansive, full of flowers, tame animals, and kind friends, is a dream-like world, in which Wallace feels that lightness and happiness exist in the very air he breathes. He discovers the garden behind the door in the wall when he is only five years old, and experiences a feeling like homecoming—contentment, belonging, and joy—for the first time in his life. There, happily playing with other children, Wallace forgets the outside world, the strictness of his father, and the loneliness of his life.
When a woman in the garden shows him a book containing pictures of his life, however, and he wishes to turn the page past his present moment—a metaphorical indication of his focus towards the future—he finds himself shut out of the garden. In this way, the garden acts for Wallace as a perfect moment of childhood, now forever lost to him. In addition, the garden is set up as being entirely at odds with any ambition or even a desire to know what happens in the future. The garden is a heaven of sorts, but as a heaven it is entirely static, outside of time or progress, and as such incompatible with the material world.
Wallace’s loss of the perfect garden also evokes the Garden of Eden; Wallace transgresses by thoughtlessly seeking knowledge from the picture book and is banished, unable to return. To live in the Garden of Eden is to retain the innocence of childhood. Wallace’s early advancement, his ability to speak from a young age, and the ambition instilled in him by his father make him incompatible with the perfect peace of the garden. The garden’s resemblance to the Garden of Eden implies that Wallace, ambitious and quick to grow up, can visit the garden, but can’t stay or, in later years, return. His own priorities, his desire for success and achievement, prevent him from reaching the garden. As long as Wallace is ambitious, he cannot have perfect peace. The garden therefore becomes a symbol of the lost world of true contentment which Wallace is banished from by age, by transgression, or by his own choices.
The Garden Quotes in The Door in the Wall
Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.
It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that garden into which he came.
(…) In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad—as only in rare moments, and when one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world.
But— it’s odd—there’s a gap in my memory. I don’t remember the games we played. I never remembered. Afterwards, as a child, I spent long hours trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to play it all over again— in my nursery—by myself. No! All I remember is the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with me…
Poor little wretch I was!—brought back to this grey world again! As I realised the fulness of what had happened to me, I gave way to quite ungovernable grief. And the shame and humiliation of that public weeping and my disgraceful home-coming remain with me still.
‘If 1 had stopped,’ I thought, ‘I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxford— muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see things better!’ I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.
The Garden Symbol Timeline in The Door in the Wall
