Lionel Wallace as Tragic Hero in "The Door in the Wall"

Wallace as Tragic Hero

In "The Door in the Wall" by H.G. Wells, our hero is Lionel Wallace. His heroism lies in his ongoing fight with his childhood memories and the knowledge that there is an easier way. He perseveres in life even though he feels its tediousness. Wallace is a tragic hero. The tragedy is that he yielded to the door's attraction when he was too young to understand the consequences, and from that moment forward he must fight its pull every single day — a struggle that makes his real life all the more unpleasant.

The story revolves around Wallace's encounter with a green door when he is five or six years old. He enters through this door and finds an enchanted world. On leaving it, the memory haunts him for the rest of his life. We see Wallace encounter the door again and again, each time declining to enter for a different reason.

The Door and the Enchanted World

Inside the door is both a paradise and an escape from the real world. Wallace's first encounter describes just how enchanted this place was, capturing his feelings in the garden as "exquisitely glad — as only in rare moments and when one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world." This conveys how much more pleasing the enchanted world was compared to everyday life. On returning to reality, he describes himself as weeping with "ungovernable grief" and longing desperately for the garden: "Oh! Take me back to the garden."

In his teenage years Wallace says his failure to re-enter the door was not really a matter of deliberate choice but of circumstance. Later, as he grows older, we see him consider the door more carefully, each time choosing not to enter for a different reason. As he grows older still, the door appears more frequently and his longing for it deepens. He describes this longing: "If ever that door offers it 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 swore it and when the time came — I didn't go."

The heroism of Wallace is also evident in that, despite his longing for the green door, he makes a genuine success of his life. The narrator observes that "when he was holding his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes."

Heroism Through Perseverance and Success

Notably, it is often in not choosing the door that he achieves his greatest accomplishments. On one occasion he passes the door on his way to sit a scholarship examination, later realizing, "If I had stopped… I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxford — muddled all the fine career before me."

The tragic dimension of the story lies in how profoundly the door haunts Wallace and diminishes his enjoyment of life. The narrator describes him as being filled "with insatiable longings that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him." The effect of this is captured in the words of a woman who loved him: "The interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn't care a rap for you — under his very nose."

Wallace is heroic in that he fought his whole life to find meaning in the real world and not yield to how dull it truly felt to him. He had the courage to resist his desire and fight on regardless. The tragedy, however, is that he encountered the door at far too young an age. Even at five, "he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was wrong of him… to yield to this attraction." Yet a natural childhood curiosity tragically won out on that first occasion, and the promise of paradise haunted him forever after.