In H. G. Wells’ “The Door in the Wall,” the narrator Redmond relates the story of his friend Lionel Wallace’s encounters with a green door in a white wall, and the fantastical garden of otherworldly peace, beauty, and happiness that lies behind the door. Wallace first comes upon the door and garden at five years old. The door then appears to him multiple times over the course of his life, but in each case, for various reasons, he doesn’t go through it. Over time, though, he becomes increasingly regretful about his repeated choices to not return to the garden. A few months after his conversation with Redmond, he is found dead, having fallen into a deep hole after apparently mistaking a door to a railway construction site for the door to the magic garden. In the world of the story, it’s never made clear whether Wallace’s fantastical door and garden was real—a real magical entrance to a real magical garden—or merely a dream, hallucination, or product of a powerful imagination. While the story initially sets up this question of the reality of the door and garden as key, the fact that the story never answers the question suggests that the story’s actual concerns rest elsewhere, and that in fact such a binary true/false view misunderstands the nature of these “dreamers, these men of vision” who experience visions such as the garden, and their potential impact on the “real” world.
“The Door in the Wall” immediately establishes the question of the truth of Wallace’s story as being key. Before the narrator, Redmond, explains the content of Wallace’s story in any way, he raises the question of its believability. Redmond then goes into great detail about why he initially believed it, came to doubt it, and then ultimately concluded that, while he wasn’t sure what to believe, he believed that Wallace himself believed the story he was telling to be true. Redmond comments that “the reader must judge for himself.” By casting the reader as the judge of this question, the narrator implies that answering this question—getting to the truth—will be the thrust of the story. Throughout the story, details provided can then be seen as supporting or casting doubt on the story about the door in the wall. For instance, the fact that Wallace’s memories of the garden from his childhood visit are somewhat hazy, or that Wallace speculates that in thinking about the garden after first visiting it he may have inadvertently changed details, or that no one else—neither his father nor other kids at school—ever believes him when he tells them of the garden, all seem to suggest that the garden may be imaginary. At the same time, the fact that Wallace is immensely successful—he was a star in school and now is about to become a government cabinet minister—implies that what he describes can be generally taken with confidence as being accurate and true.
In its final section, though, the story takes a turn. Redmond reveals that shortly after Wallace told him about the door in the wall, Wallace was found dead, a result of stepping through a temporary door in the boarded fence around a construction site and falling to his death in a dark pit. Initially it seems as if this outcome will answer the question posed at the beginning of the story. If Wallace would do something so silly as to get himself killed by mistaking a wall in a construction fence for his magical door, and then fall to his death in a dark pit, surely his entire vision of the garden must have been little more than a hallucination. And that hallucination, moreover, led Wallace first to a deep regret about choosing his successful life over the promise of the garden, and then to his death. Some version of this story might in the end suggest that the inability to realize what is and isn’t fantasy is ultimately self-destructive. And, in fact, Redmond himself says that “there are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of… a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination.” Yet Redmond doesn’t stop there, and instead notes that “I am more than half-convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift… that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet… into another and altogether more beautiful world.” And then Redmond contests that this “outlet” betrayed Wallace in the end. Redmond argues that while “we see our world fair and common” such that we only see the boarded-up fence and the dark pit, that, in contrast, “these dreamers, these men of vision” such as Wallace might see things entirely differently. In this way, after at first charging the reader with serving as a judge of the truth of Wallace’s story, Redmond now pulls the rug out from under the reader’s feet and suggests that whether the door or garden are “real” is beside the point, and that focusing on that question misunderstands a deeper truth within Wallace’s experiences that transcends whether or not the door or garden are “real.”
By connecting Wallace with “dreamers” and “men of vision,” Redmond implicitly connects Wallace to prophets, shamans, or other past visionaries. Through this connection, Redmond suggests that Wallace’s door and garden are similar to the spiritual visions of these past dreamers—it should not be taken as a coincidence, for instance, that Wallace’s garden bears a resemblance to the biblical Garden of Eden. This is not to say that the story is suggesting that Wallace definitively experienced a vision of heaven. Rather, the story seems instead to imply that the mystery it originally describes—is the door real or not—is unknowable, is a realm not of logic but of faith. And, further, that it is within this unknowability and faith that the power of such visions—and of the visionaries who have them and as a result of having them no longer fit in the normal world—reside.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Reality, Fantasy, Dreams, and Visions ThemeTracker
Reality, Fantasy, Dreams, and Visions Quotes in The Door in the Wall
As his memory of that childish experience ran, he did at the very first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was wrong of him— he could not tell which—to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning—unless memory has played him the queerest trick— that the door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose. (…) And it was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never explained, that his father would be very angry if he went in through that door.
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.
And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?
Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger, and death.
But did he see like that?
