The Abyss inside
Edith Wharton’s “The Bolted Door”

“Have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?” (“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Alan Poe).
Edith Wharton’s “The Bolted Door” unspins memories of other literary works: “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Alan Poe, and “Faust” by Goethe. The abyss inside and the social gestures outside of the first; madness as an acute perception of the senses in Poe’s short story, or the search for a contractual destructive bond which resonates with Goethe’s “Faust.” These might be some compelling threads to bring these works together.
Hear the chiming of the clock, the thud of the bolted door in the asylum, the throbbing of the heart, and the creaking wood, consider Hubert’s spasmodic shoulders, the old man’s eye …. the pungency of sounds entangled, mental and physical reverberate in both stories Edith Wharton’s “The Bolted Door” and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”.
Let us examine the openings of Edith’s short story “The Bolted Door” and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”:
1.”In exactly three minutes Mr. Peter Ascham, of the eminent legal firm of Ascham and Pettilow, would have his punctual hand on the doorbell of the flat. It was a comfort to reflect that Ascham was so punctual—the suspense was beginning to make his host nervous. And the sound of the doorbell would be the beginning of the end—after that, there’d be no going back, by God—no going back! “ (“The Bolted Door” by Edith Wharton)
2.”True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” (“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Alan Poe)
Both appeal to a feeling of restlessness and disquietness which has to do with the senses. Words like “Irritably, nervous, spasmodic” pepper the opening, paralleling Hubert’s nerve-wracking feelings with those of Poe’s narrator in the “Tell-Tale Heart.”
Hubert Granice’s life ennui, “his abyss inside,” his feeling of failure, and purposelessness drive him into a spiral of self-destruction and a distraught nervous system.
“It was not recovered pleasure in life that he felt, but only a deeper withdrawal into himself. It was easier to go on automatically with the social gestures than to uncover to any human eye the abyss within him”
In a frustrated attempt to perpetrate his death, he requests, in a Faustian-like way, his lawyer, Peter Ascham, to do it for him. Ascham has settled his will, as well as supervised his thespian contracts but, now, he is asked to be part of a life and death deal which he refuses and does not take seriously. The question of Hubert’s insanity starts to take shape. He claims that he has killed Joseph Lenman, his mother’s cousin, to appropriate the money that already by inheritance belongs to him.
In the manuscript found in his drawer next to the revolver with which he tries to attempt against his life, we know of his being rejected as a playwright for lack of drama: “My dear Mr Granice….the play won’t do, it isn’t the poetry that scares her—or me either. We both want to do all we can to help along the poetic drama---….the fact is that there isn’t enough drama in your play to the allowance of poetry."
The irony is that Hubert’s own story provides the drama his play lacks, and in a nested narrative /framed story narrative technique, the script unfolds parading a series of characters that seem to impersonate different roles: from detectives, to lawyers, journalists, and doctors that play detectives. He desperately looks for endorsement that will grant his much-desired death. Ironically, he has perpetrated the “perfect crime,” with no loose ends nor evidence that can incriminate him.
As nobody believes him, he is finally confined to an asylum in which he is constantly trying to rewrite, and reenact statements that may compromise him. There is only a faded hint at the end of an already a-missed sanity. McCarren states: “I did it get a clue ….it wasn’t a delusion ...I tumbled on the truth by the merest accident ...I couldn’t hang the poor devil ...but I am glad when they collared him, and had him stowed away safe in here.”
At the end, he is stowed away physically in an asylum and mentally in the eternal torment of his unproven thoughts.
And the door was bolted