50 pages • 1 hour read
Ray BradburyThe Veldt
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Psychological Dangers of Technology
The dangers of overusing technology is the overarching theme of “The Veldt,” and indeed of much of Bradbury’s science fiction. Bradbury wrote his stories at a time of expanding innovation in technology, with particular attention devoted to gadgetry that would improve domestic life. Many commentators in the post-World War II years began to worry about the physical and psychological effects of the new technology. Bradbury makes a brief allusion to the new interest in space exploration with his reference to a “rocket to New York” (246); for the most part, his technological fantasy centers on the home.
George reminds Lydia that they bought the Happy-life Home “so we wouldn’t have to do anything” (242). Various machines in the house cook meals, tie shoes, brush teeth, clean up, and convey people pneumatically up the stairs to their bedrooms. There is little left for human beings to do except sit passively and watch what the machines are doing. Peter complains, “I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?” (248). In this new technological order, Human beings are reduced to mere spectators. Thus, one of the major effects of technology, in Bradbury’s view, is that it encourages laziness and makes people spoiled.
The technological world, created by adults, corrupts the children. While the parents are old enough to remember a time before the technological era—as shown in Lydia’s nostalgia for traditional housework and George’s desire for his son to learn to paint—the children are brought up in the new environment; this is all they know. They accept it as normal. Bradbury implies that children are not wholly innocent and that they have, in seed form, the selfish and violent passions that infect adult human beings. Although children are the products of their environment, they also have an innate corruption rooted in human nature.
We also see how technology weakens human relations and human character. Peter and Wendy miss dinner because they are out enjoying a “plastic carnival” (243), “televising home” to say they will be late. The nursery drives a huge wedge between the children and their parents so that they are barely able to communicate. Peter “snaps” at his father and rarely looks at either him or his mother (247). Bradbury implies that too much technology has disastrous consequences, leading to hatred and enmity between people and, ultimately, to death.
The Dangers of Spoiling Children
George says of Peter and Wendy that they “come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring” (246). This is borne out by the conversation in which Peter threatens his father if he turns off the nursery, then when he and Wendy throw a violent tantrum. George says that both the adults and the children have been spoiled by the Happy-life Home and that the original purchase was a result of “pride, money, foolishness” (251). Throughout the story the children take advantage of and try to manipulate their parents, then turn against them when they don’t get their way. Conversely, the adults recognize that they have been infantilized by the technology. They are babied and coddled, as when a chair immediately responds to Lydia’s distress and “rocks and comforts” her (242). A lack of discipline—of both the children and the adults—has created the Hadley’s disastrous addiction.
The Effect of Technology on Relationships and Artistic Growth
Just as the distinction between adults and children is blurred, so is the distinction between human beings and machines. The machines fulfill the roles of humans, and the latter start to behave in an impersonal manner like machines, as when Peter looks down at his shoes instead of at his father (247). They even talk to the machines, as when George commands the nursery to change to the story of Aladdin (244), or when Peter plaintively cries up at the ceiling not to let his parents shut down the house (251). Bradbury implies that letting machines take too large a role in our lives causes relationships to deteriorate, to the point where human beings treat each other no differently than machines.
The nursery is programmed to reproduce whatever the visitor imagines: “[George] knew the principle of the room exactly. You sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear” (244). Bradbury depicts a world in which virtually no effort is required to accomplish anything; machines respond to one’s every need and desire. Life is a succession of passive pleasures rather than active involvement. Thus, Peter only wants to “look and listen and smell” (248) and would rather have the “picture painter” paint for him than learn an artistic skill himself. Bradbury depicts this state of affairs as disastrous because it destroys the natural human impulse to create and be useful—an impulse that Lydia still feels and wants to recapture. It also blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality, making human beings unfit to live in the real world.
Science as a Force for Good and Evil
Bradbury portrays science as a force that can be used for good or for ill. Allied to commercial interests, science created the infantilizing and addictive technology of the Happy-life Home. On the other hand, science—and in particular the science of psychology represented by David McClean—is a potential force for good in helping people lead balanced and healthy lives. McClean explains that the nursery was originally created with the intent of studying children’s behavioral patterns and thus helping to improve their mental lives. When the Hadleys misuse it, the nursery becomes instead (in the words of McClean) a channel toward destructive thoughts. Thus, Bradbury suggests that the true value of science lies in the human intent and will behind it.
Respect for the discipline of psychology is typical of the post-World War II era, when psychoanalysis and the theories of Freud were becoming increasingly popular. David McClean is a stand-in for the figure of the wise psychiatrist, motivated by a desire to bring emotional stability to children. At the same time, the story might make us question the belief that manipulating children through social conditioning is a good idea, as McClean seems to imply (249).
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