Disappearance In Georhe Hadley's 'The Veldt'

All too often, parents receive the blame when their children commit horrible crimes, from theft to murder and all amoral acts in-between. In The Veldt, the blame is on the technologically advanced house. Thus, the blame for spoiled rotten, homicidal children, falls not solely on the parents, but more so on society’s lust for advancement. The house, in doing everything for the occupants has, in a way, stolen their humanity. The parents, being no longer responsible for themselves, have also failed to nurture and discipline the children, the ones who need it the most. The nursery becomes their surrogate parents, but technology cannot think or feel on it’s own by relying on objectionable past experiences, if it has learned any emotions or thoughts, it has done so only be replicating what the children feel. The children who feel alienated from their mother and father, who have no real boundaries or rules, and therefore, the technology they have influenced knows no different.

The nursery has based everything it knows off of the children’s experiences, and so when Georhe Hadley attempts to regain control or possession of the nursery, he fails.

He fails because he has no connection emotionally with his children and therefore the children have taugh the nursery to have no connection or recognition of the parents, except distrust and hate. The reason for this is because the parents have the power to take the nursery away from the children, and if that happens, then the nursery will die. In order to sustain it’s own life, the nursery and the children have formed emotional bonds and the parents are therefore the outsiders, or the threat that must be devoured by the

lions.
An African veldt is wild and untamed, much like the children who are undisciplined and more emotionally connected to technoogy. Outside of the nursery they are not in control of their world, or their environment, but withing the nursery they are like gods. They command the world inside, and before their father George took the nursery away from them as a punishment, they used to play with Aladin and _________. Consequently, when they realized their most beloved world could be stolen from them, they lost their innocence and began devising a plan to remove any future threats of the room being closed off again. It is no acident that they are named Wendy and Peter, as it is a reference to Peter Pan, and Neverland where children never have to grow up. Growing up means responsibilites, work, and worst of all for the children, discipline. They prefer to live in an imaginary world and are willing to do anything to keep it, even if it means killing their parents.
It is wonderfully clever to have the lions eat the parents at the end. not only is it a metaphor about the booming consumer society Americans live in, it is also a metaphor on how their own need to compete in a materialistic society brought about their deaths as domesticity has also died. They were consumed by their own materialistic lust, and the end of domestic life and raising moral obedient children who are more in love with what technology has to offer. In this light, Badbury has strategically used the home as a metaphor for what was taking place in America during the 1950s, a time when “...marriage and home ownership rates skyrocketed...many Americans were content to pursue the “American Dream.””( ) Americans, after the war, were being lulled into believing that consumerism was the way to achieve the American Dream, and competition was becoming fierce, more so than it had before the 1950’s.