The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
The Character: George Hadley
George Hadley assumes that everything is fine at home. His wife, Lydia, has no housework to do anymore. Their children, Wendy and Peter, would not be trouble to her because they can go to the nursery anytime they want and any time their mother wants some peace. George is very proud of himself. He is one of the few men who can provide the best in housing and new technology for his family. He works hard and he provides for them better than anyone else could do. He feels very confident that he is a good father and a good husband. He does not know much about the children on a one-to-one level but he makes sure they have everything they need, plenty of food, clothes and a great new house. When George met Lydia he had been sure that she was the one he would marry. When he asked her to marry him, he promised her that she would have only the best. They would have beautiful and smart children. They would have a nice vacation every year. He would work as hard as necessary to make sure she had the best that suburban life had to offer. After all she was going to be the mother of his children so of course, she deserves the best. Now that he has all his ducks in a row, that is a wife, two children, expensive suburban house, he feels he can concentrate on his career. When he is home he feels good about having the best technology that money can buy. The house cooks, cleans, babysits, brushes their teeth and rocks their beds so they can sleep at night. The only problem is that when he is at home something does not feel right. But he is sure that he must be imaging things. Lydia keeps saying some very odd things about the nursery but really, she makes no sense at all. He was not going to even think about the house or his home when he had so much work to think about. He still adores Lydia so he cannot ignore her discomfort about the nursery. Today she asked him to come with her into the nursery. The children are out of the house so this would be a good time to go into the nursery. George says to Lydia in the nursery,
“Let’s get out of this sun. This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.” (Section 2 Paragraph 1)
George often said to Lydia lately, “I don’t see anything wrong.” His father was a great Dad. He was not around the house much. But he and his brothers had everything they wanted. When new toys were put on the market, George and his brothers, got it before anyone else in the neighborhood. The same with athletic shoes, clothes and sports equipment they knew as soon as the product was stocked in the stores where they shopped they could buy anything. They were the coolest of the cool from elementary school all the way until they graduated from high school. His mom was always there for him whenever he needed her. She had an office at home and someone to take care of the house and someone else to do the cooking. No one ever knew when Dad would be around because he had so much work and he had to travel all the time. It did not matter to George and his brothers as long as they knew that Mom was close by. George really, really enjoys his work. He enjoys working so much that it is hard for him to stop work at the end of the day sometimes. He tries not to take work home with him though. He is working in a fast track to the top managerial position of the local corporate office. He promised Lydia he would do that so he would not be traveling. He wanted to please Lydia as much as he could. They were going to be married forever until death do them part so he did not want to take chances. If she told him she wanted something he did what he could to make her happy. He did not always listen to what she was saying but when he was paying attention he always tried to make her happy. He did not know much about Peter and Wendy. When he and his brothers were growing up they grew up mostly by themselves. He did not see why Peter and Wendy needed a lot of attention. When they wanted something he got it for them. Well, that was until lately when they were really getting out of control. He was bad guy that did the punishing. He sent them to bed early or locked them out of the nursery for punishment. He had not let them go to New York on a trip by themselves and they had been outrageous. He did not like to say ‘no’ to his children. He was the parent though. He was the father. There was only so far he would go before the children pushed him too far. The psychologist had told George and Lydia that their children were spoiled. More spoiled than other spoiled children either. So George tried to tell them ‘no’ more often. Lydia would tell him how things had gone during the day, she would tell him what she thought should be done, then George would try to do what she said. Lately she had been worried about them and something about being in the playroom playing Africa. He tried to punish them several times by locking up the nursery for one week. But the nursery never stayed lock for a week. So far the nursery had never stayed locked for 24 hours in a row. The children’s tantrums were terrible and frightening. Soon Lydia would start begging George to open the nursery again. So he would.
When George says to Lydia “this is a little too real” he seems to be saying out loud that what is happening can be ‘real’ or ‘too real’ but in the way he structured his life those were the only two choices. George feels to his core that technology had been developed to be 100 percent safe and reliable. When something with the nursery did not seem right George was very good at denial. He was getting some urgent niggling from his subconscious lately though about things that just did not seem appropriate. When he hears the screams at night he gets up to take more sleeping pills, when he sees Lydia’s bloody scarf he subconsciously feels a stab of terror which he pushed down. The atmosphere in the house had him feeling anxious which he had tried to hide from Lydia. Sometimes he got a feeling from Lydia recently that he had let her down in some way. The children treated him like he was a stranger. He missed having them sit on his lap. He missed having breakfast and supper together with the whole family.
George is good at avoiding anything that makes him uncomfortable like he wants “to get out of this (very hot) sun.” He wants to avoid the sun. He wants to deny that the temperature is much too high for young children in a nursery. He is sweating like crazy. He can feel the sweat gathering on his eyebrows and pretty it will be dripping. He cannot deny that he is really sweating because the sweat is there dripping. But he is able to deny it. It is real but not in his framework of reality. He could be concerned about the sun be so hot it made him sweat so much but probably it was just because he was not used to the sun. There was always some excuse or some ‘reason’ for avoiding reality. There were vultures in his children’s nursery yet still he denied that anything much could be wrong. The lions in the Veldt are eating fresh, raw meat in his children’s nursery. The lions were far away until all of a sudden they were right next to George and Lydia. Lydia heard a scream and George is right there beside her but even his ears are closed to any unpleasant information. He rushes out of the nursery with Lydia and then laughs to show, not his bravado so much as the fact that he has everything under control. She does not need to cry it cannot be such a big deal that she should cry over it. Finally after quite a few days something is getting through to George that all is not well with the nursery. This goes against everything he always said he believed in. He keeps avoiding reality and denying the signs in a general way. On the other hand he does start taking small actions. He locks the door of the nursery even though the children would hate it. He goes back later in the nursery to check on his own if the mechanism is working well. Clearly it is not working the way it is supposed to work. He calls for the nursery to change into new fairy tales but the Veldt stays there. After that he finally admitted that the nursery was not working properly yet he had left the door unlocked and Wendy was able to go back inside the nursery when she and Peter returned home. Then almost at until the end some of his brain signals that were telling him that something was wrong had gotten through to his thinking. Except for another period of ignoring reality and letting the children unlock the nursery and go back inside it.
The text is concerned about Lydia not being heard by her husband. Her concerns fall on deaf ears as far as George taking some action anyway. The text demonstrates Lydia’s frustrations and fears which George avoids hearing. The text likes the idea of a happy family with parents and children doing things together. There seems to be some cheering from the text when decisions are made to get away from the house and take a vacation. Also there are positive messages about getting back to the old fashioned way of getting through the day. That means that someone has to cook and clean. People will have to take care of themselves. But the text seems to feel this is much better than the technology. The technology is bloody and filthy. There is no place for it in home. It makes people jumpy and anxious. The children should be more like children and not have so much power over their parents. The text kept giving George warnings. It was warning George that he was losing his family. Technology is not a good replacement for family love.
Work Cited:
Bradbury, Ray. (1950). The Veldt” 8 March 2004. Web. Accessed 18 April 2012 from http://www.d.umn.edu/~csigler/PDF%20files/bradbury_veldt.pdf
