Ambition and Material Success vs Contentment and Joy Theme Analysis

H. G. Wells’ “The Door in the Wall” relates the story of Lionel Wallace, who, throughout his life, was precocious and successful. He learned to speak at a young age, was responsible beyond his years, excelled first in school and then in his career, and by the age of thirty-nine was about to move into the upper echelons of government. He is successful in a way that would make anyone—including Redmond, the narrator of the story—envious and amazed. Yet Wallace’s childhood memories of the magic garden he encountered beyond the green door make him aware of a different possibility in life that stands in opposition to material or competitive success. In his brief time in the garden, he experiences peace, contentment, purely collaborative play (as opposed to competition), and human connection. After that first encounter with the door, every subsequent time Wallace comes upon it occurs during a critical moment that could affect his success in normal life, which leads him to choose not to open it. In consistently setting the contentment of the garden against Wallace’s pursuit of success in the world, the story implies that contentment and success stand in opposition to and are irreconcilable with each other.

Expectations of great material success are placed on Wallace from a young age, first by his father and later by himself. The achievement of success in school and his career, however, does not bring him contentment or real joy. From the outset of the story, Wells establishes Wallace as a highly competent and “extremely successful” person. When he applies himself, he excels in school and achieves increasingly important positions of power in the government. He exceeds his goals and receives his stern father’s praise. However, when distracted by the reverie of his past contentment in the garden, Wallace fails to achieve the material success he is otherwise capable of. For instance, after the door appears to him in his school days and he passes it by in order to preserve his perfect attendance record for punctuality, he later becomes despondent and receives bad reports for two terms. Similarly, after passing the door by in order to continue an important conversation to advance his career, he later neglects his work. Even the thought of the contentment of the garden reduces his ambition and prevents him from achieving material success. In addition, when Wallace does apply himself and achieve his goals, as he reveals to Redmond, his extraordinary accomplishments do not bring him joy. He is “sorrowful and bitter,” engaging in work he finds “toilsome” and unrewarding. His labors and his repeated rejection of the door have made him an impressive and prominent politician, but his lack of satisfaction with his life—as well as his deep despair compared with to the comfortable freedom of his early childhood—implies that ambition cannot coexist with joy.

Wells presents the garden and its perfect contentment as the natural opposite of Wallace’s competitive world of grades, accomplishments, and government positions. One of Wallace’s first perceptions of the door as a child is that his father—“who gave him little attention and expected great things of him”—would be angry with him if he went through it, portraying the door as the enemy of his father’s pragmatic worldview of the importance of career accomplishment and material success. When Wallace does go through the door, the very air of the garden on the other side makes Wallace forget the “discipline and obedience of home.” Just as Wallace struggles to achieve material success while occupied with thinking about the garden in his real life, he is unable to conceive of ambition while inside the garden. The joy of the garden is all-consuming—ambition cannot exist within it.

The story constantly amplifies the tension between the contentment offered by the garden and the promise of success in the “real world” such that there is no middle ground: the choice for one always involves giving up the other entirely. Wallace describes himself as both “passionately” desiring the garden and feeling a “gravitational pull” towards the opportunities for success afforded by work and school. The force of these two opposing desires creates the primary conflict of Wallace’s life, which he is never able to resolve. After his first encounter with the door as a child, the door only appears to Wallace during important life moments that will materially affect his success, such as when he is rushing to be on time to school or is in the middle of a key meeting. Similarly, it is impossible for him to locate the door during quiet times. He is not given the option to both experience the contentment of the garden and maintain the success of his illustrious career, implying that the combination of contentment and success is not possible at all. The door presents itself only as an exchange, and one that Wallace understands as a permanent one: if he goes into the garden, he will “go and never return,” trading his ambitious life for a content one. And, near the end of the story, he becomes certain that having chosen not to go into the garden on each occasion when he’s had the chance, he’ll now never get the chance again.

At the beginning of his career, when he had experienced only a little success, Wallace valued ambition and success far more, understanding them to be things “that merited sacrifice.” Near the end of his life, though, having actually experienced power and success, he wonders whether achieving his ambitions was indeed worth the sacrifice of a life with contentment. After repeatedly choosing to pass the door by and attempting to find joy in a life of prominence and political success, he comes to believe that success, the thing he has sought all his life and finally achieved, is “vulgar, tawdry, irksome,” and ultimately unworthy of its necessary sacrifice of contentment. The pursuit of success is indeed a sacrifice, as is the pursuit of contentment. For Wallace, and perhaps, the story implies, for everyone, to have one is to sacrifice the other.