The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Technology is the collection of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used for the use of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives. It was meant to make human life easier and have faster communications. In Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt the author goes against just that. Ray Bradbury teaches us to not let your whole life depend on technology due to the fact of missing out on reality. You can see the first hint of Bradbury’s message when Lydia Hadley, the wife to George Hadley and mother to Peter and Wendy Hadley, is upset with how she feels about her life and had to confess, that’s just it.

I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nurse for the children. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and clean the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic body wash can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me.

It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately. This is quote is shown near the middle of the story after Lydia comes to the realization of where she and technology stands in her family and starts to complain about how the house and all its gadgets need to be shut down.

Once Lydia pulls her thoughts together, it finally becomes clear to her that she has been taken away of her role as a mother and wife and is now only another useless person living in the house.

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Technology has taken her responsibilities as a wife and a mother, making her feel irrelevant to her own family. Another hint of Bradbury’s messages is shown after the Hadleys noticed that the nursery was staying as the African Veldt for too long so they decided to call David McClean, the family psychologist. The author wrote, You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s feelings. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun.

George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d go hungry tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to cook an egg. All the same, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. When McClean diagnoses the current impact of technology on the Hadley family, he took time to take in all the information about their lives. The Hadley’s lives had too much technological advancements that did all their basic needs automatically, which took over their need for effort or knowledge by people. The knowledge for basic life skills lessoned within the family until, it was completely forgotten.