Edward Angkatell's suicide attempt

Edward Angkatell's suicide attempt is the decisive crisis in his movement from passive self-contempt toward emotional recognition. In the small hours at The Hollow, he turns on the kitchen gas oven and places his head inside it, but Midge Hardcastle discovers him before the attempt is complete. Her practical rescue preserves his life; more importantly, the scene forces Edward to articulate the failures and rejected attachments that have made him regard himself as barely alive, and it opens the possibility of a life founded on his love for Midge rather than on his nostalgic fixation with Henrietta Savernake.

Causes and Background

Edward's attempt arises from a settled conviction that he is ineffective in a world organized around more forceful people. He contrasts himself with John Christow, whom he sees as a man who acts, succeeds, and attracts women's admiration. Against that image of masculine achievement, Edward places his own lack of a career, his failure as a writer, and his dependence on the inheritance of Ainswick. He believes that, without the house and the money that allow him to live, he would already have gone under.

His despair is also shaped by romantic rejection. He tells Midge that Henrietta did not want him and that no one wanted him, recalling an earlier moment at the Berkeley and interpreting Midge's refusal to accept him as further proof of the same judgment. His account reveals that he has treated both love and social usefulness as tests he has repeatedly failed. The attempt is therefore not presented as an isolated impulse, but as the extreme action produced by accumulated humiliation, dependency, and the belief that he has no viable place among the people around him.

The emotional crisis has been intensified by Edward's misreading of Midge's feelings. Midge believes that he still loves Henrietta, and Edward has indeed preserved Henrietta as an image from the past rather than encountering her fully as the woman she is. His attachment to an idealized earlier Henrietta leaves him unable to recognize the living relationship available to him with Midge. The attempt exposes the destructive consequence of that fixation: Edward has mistaken the persistence of an old image for the absence of any possible future.

Discovery and Rescue

Midge lies awake, dry-eyed and restless, after hearing Edward's door open and his footsteps pass into the corridor. Her uneasiness, already associated with The Hollow after John Christow's death, eventually overcomes her inactivity. She puts on a dressing gown, takes a flashlight, and searches the dark house. Because the front and side doors are locked, she realizes that Edward has not gone outside and continues toward the kitchen.

A faint smell of gas leads her through the partly open baize door. She finds Edward on the kitchen floor with his head inside the gas oven, which is turned on full. Her response is immediate rather than theatrical. She opens the shutters, breaks the window with a glass cloth wrapped around her arm when the latch will not yield, pulls Edward away from the oven, and turns off the taps. She then drags him toward the moving air and gathers him into her arms while waiting for him to recover consciousness.

The rescue depends on Midge's practical competence and physical determination. She understands that Edward has only recently lost consciousness, and that the open window will disperse the fumes. When he stirs, groans, and opens his eyes, he can initially offer only the fragmentary explanation, “Gas oven...” The broken window becomes a concrete trace of the emergency, but Midge's first concern is not how the scene will appear to others; it is keeping Edward alive.

Confession and Recognition

When Midge demands to know why he has done it, Edward describes the oven as the “Best way out.” The phrase gives his act a chilling simplicity, yet his explanation immediately expands beyond the mechanics of suicide into a confession of identity. He says that he now knows he has never been any good, has always been a failure, and has always been ineffectual. John Christow represents everything he believes himself not to be: action, achievement, and the power to command admiration.

Edward also names the material protection that has concealed his weakness. He has inherited Ainswick and has enough money to live, but he regards that inheritance not as accomplishment but as the sole barrier preventing total collapse. His statement that he is not even quite alive turns economic dependence, failed vocation, and romantic disappointment into a single existential judgment. He sees himself as someone carried by circumstances rather than someone capable of directing a life.

Midge answers the confession by explaining that her apparent rejection was caused by her belief that Edward remained in love with Henrietta. This clarification breaks the closed circuit of mutual misunderstanding. Edward then looks at Midge not as a temporary alternative to Henrietta but as a continuous, substantial person: the schoolgirl he once knew, the woman before him, and the future older woman he can already imagine. The vision replaces his backward-looking projection of Henrietta with an image of Midge extending through time.

His recognition is expressed in deliberately concrete terms. He experiences Midge as warm, strong, positive, alive, and real, calling her the rock on which he can build his life. He tells her that he loves her and asks her never to leave him again. The confession does not erase the despair that brought him to the oven, but it changes its direction: the man who had sought an exit discovers, through Midge's care and the truth of her feeling, a relationship in which he can imagine remaining.

Aftermath and Significance

The immediate aftermath is intimate but still tied to the practical world. Edward says that he could stay there forever, while Midge insists that they must sleep and confront the problem of explaining the broken window to Lucy Angkatell. At six o'clock, Midge returns to her room and prepares to account for the damage, turning the remnants of a life-threatening act into a domestic fact that the household must absorb.

The scene therefore joins violent inward collapse to the social routines of The Hollow. Elsewhere, grief after John Christow's death is managed through guarded conversation, surveillance, and even carefully chosen food; here, suicide is likewise followed by the question of how its visible consequences will be explained. The contrast does not make the attempt trivial. It shows how extraordinary suffering is repeatedly forced back into ordinary forms of speech, household management, and concealment.

Edward's survival also forms a sharp contrast with other characters' protective performances. Gerda Christow's apparent blankness can conceal knowledge that she deliberately withholds, while Lucy Angkatell can treat the unexplained presence of the Mauser .25 in her egg basket as a problem of absentminded reasoning. Edward, by contrast, begins in concealment but ends in disclosure: the gas oven is a hidden act, yet the rescue compels him to say what he believes about himself and why he has mistaken Midge's love.

The attempt's deepest consequence is not merely that Edward lives. It produces a reversal in his understanding of the relationships that have governed him. Henrietta belongs to a past image he has preserved; Midge becomes the living reality capable of sharing a future. The attempt thus functions as a threshold between Edward's passive existence, sustained by inheritance and self-pity, and a possible renewed life grounded in reciprocal recognition. Its significance lies in the fact that death is approached as an escape from failed identity, but survival becomes the occasion on which that identity can finally be revised.