“The Door in the Wall” tells the story of a man, Wallace, who in his long-ago youth stepped through a magical door and experienced a brief, hazy moment of golden perfection—love, harmony, and pure connection. The story never makes clear if that moment was or was not imaginary, but in some sense it hardly matters. What matters instead is that Wallace consistently has the feeling that he can go back to that time—the door appears to him at times in his life—but he is never in fact quite able to step back through the door. His current life and concerns always intervene, whether the need to get to school, or visit his father’s death bed, or continue an important meeting for his career. In this way the garden functions for Wallace like a kind of “lost golden past”—an idealized vision of a better, purer, more innocent, and yet inaccessible time that both defines Wallace’s life but also isolates him from the meaning, people, and even reality of his current life.
The garden, emblematic of the golden past, is ultimately inaccessible to Wallace despite the door’s repeated appearance in his life. The door is present and visible, yet always just out of reach. The garden, a place of “peace,” “delight,” “beauty,” and “kindness,” is a brief refuge for Wallace from his dull and joyless childhood. The possibility of a return to it continues to act as a sustaining dream for him throughout boyhood and adult life. Its repeated appearance during important moments revives his longing for the golden past of the garden. However, the garden is consistently inaccessible to Wallace after the first time due to the obligations and demands of his present adult life. For example, the last time he encounters the door, he chooses to continue a conversation important to furthering his career rather than entering and returning to the idyllic childhood dream-world of the garden. In addition, when Wallace does attempt to enter what he thinks is the door to the garden and return to the lost golden past, he ends up falling to his death in a deep pit in a railway construction site. While the story leaves open the possibility that Wallace, in death, actually does find the garden again, what’s just as clear is that while he’s alive, the idealized past is unattainable, and his belief in its accessibility only destroys the opportunities of his present.
Wallace’s proximity to the lost golden past of the garden—in his mind and memory and in his sightings of the door—alienates him from adult life and adult relationships. Wallace’s longing for the idealized and innocent golden past prevents him from fully experiencing and enjoying the realities of his life. Though immensely successful, he fails to find satisfaction in his career and personal life. His preoccupation with his lost golden past also damages his relationships and isolates him from others. For example, his father and schoolfellows both punish him for his belief in the garden. In addition, his distraction and lack of interest in his life has harmed at least one failed romantic relationship. Redmond, the narrator, recalls that a woman who once loved Wallace spoke of his “detachment” from the world and his forgetfulness of other people. The lost golden past, in the form of the garden and its door which haunt Wallace through his life, prevents him from connecting emotionally with his life. He clings to an inaccessible ideal—perfect happiness with perfectly loving friends in the garden—rather than devoting himself to the lesser connections of his real life, adult relationships, and a satisfactory career. Finally, the golden past isolates Wallace because his perception of reality is different from that shared by others like Redmond. Though the story leaves the actual existence of the door open to interpretation, it is possible that it is only a dream or hallucination, in which case Wallace’s connection to his lost past separates him from his very reality.
Wallace, while seeking advancement in his career, is at the same time constantly looking back. He is prevented from entering the door to the lost golden past of the garden because of his pursuit of success. However, he is also prevented from entering the door because, as the story implies, though it might feel imminently accessible, Wallace cannot actually live in the past. Seen in this light, the garden acts for Wallace as a coping mechanism for the disappointing realities of the present: one that is both a comforting dream and a harmful delusion. The more Wallace interacts with the world, as he does early in his career, vain and vulgar though it might be, the brighter that real world appears. It is only when he sinks into the reverie of the golden past that the present looks so dull. The “Door in the Wall” captures the way that such nostalgia for a lost past—a past that, being past, may in fact be entirely imaginary—can provide a person with both a sense of meaning, but also define or warp that person’s present. The fact that the “lost golden past” of the story is a garden from which Wallace was evicted and then can’t return also clearly evokes the Garden of Eden, and in so doing the story can also be read as portraying the way that a religion or ideology can be animated by the idea of a “lost golden past,” which offers meaning but also creates tension with the world of the present.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Lost Golden Past ThemeTracker
The Lost Golden Past 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.
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.
I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of a child. Anyhow, this second time I didn’t for a moment think of going in straight away. You see—for one thing, my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in time— set on not breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt some little desire at least to try the door—yes, I must have felt that... But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly as another obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school.
‘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.
If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in, out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will stay... I swore it, and when the time came—I didn't go.
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?
