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.
Character Analysis
George Hadley
Bradbury provides very little description for any of the characters in “The Veldt.” For example, we don’t know what George Hadley looks like, or what he does outside of the home. The author’s only concern is how his characters contribute to the story’s central action.
George starts out as calm and unperturbable, brushing aside his wife’s misgivings about the nursery, but he gradually comes over to her side. He loves his wife affectionately, listens to her, and is susceptible to being influenced by what she has to say. He is a thoughtful and reflective man. Although George has spoiled the children in the past, including building an expensive nursery for them, he eventually comes down hard on them and forbids them to use the nursery again. George thus undergoes a major character transformation in the story. By story’s end, he fully recognizes the dehumanizing effects of the Happy-life Home. Yet George comes by this change of heart largely from the influence of his wife and his friend David McClean.
George tries to assert his authority over Peter, but this proves ineffectual because he has hopelessly spoiled both the children. Thus George, like Lydia to some extent, is a weak character lacking resolve and consistency. He comes too late to his realization of the truth. He also gives in to his wife’s suggestion to turn on the nursery again, thus sealing both their fates.
The surname “Hadley” reminds us of the past participle “had.” It suggests the quality life that the family once possessed but no longer does. Their true happiness and fulfilment are now in the past yet could potentially be revived again.
Lydia Hadley
Lydia Hadley voices the very first line of the story, asking George to have a look at the nursery because something seems wrong. Lydia is prescient, intuitive, and wise to what is going on around her—more so, certainly, than her husband.
In this early part of the story, Lydia is fearful, cautious and tense, startled by the realism of the lions and clinging to George for protection. Notably, she hears a scream in the distance which George fails to notice (240-41). She also perceives more quickly than George the price they have paid for their technological lifestyle, and she expresses her desire to be useful in the home again. She feels her domestic role threatened by the machines. Later on, Lydia hypothesizes about how the children may have been tampering with the nursery and what has happened to it as a result.
In addition to her mental acuity and intuition, Lydia is able to think of constructive solutions to problems: “Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?” (242). Although at first George scoffs at Lydia’s intuitions, he later comes to agree with her.
However, Lydia in the end shows weakness and loss of nerve when, affected by the children’s tantrum, she urges George to turn the nursery back on for a few moments, thus sealing her and her husband’s fate.
In the New Testament, Lydia was an early Christian convert of St. Paul’s, considered the first convert to Christianity in Europe. Similarly, in “The Veldt,” Lydia Hadley represents a change of heart toward the prevailing order. She rebels against the modern technological world, a “conversion” that might potentially bring about other “converts.”
Peter and Wendy Hadley
The names of Peter and Wendy recall main characters in the children’s classic Peter Pan. In that story, children escape their everyday life into Neverland, a world of fantasy and carefree childhood. Similarly, the Hadley children escape reality into the fantasy world of their modern nursery, which offers a constant alternation of sensory delights and excitements.
Peter and Wendy are about 10 years old with a cherubic appearance: “cheeks like peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles” (244). George and Lydia acknowledge that their children are spoiled, being allowed to come and go as they please and trying to control and manipulate them (the parents). The text confirms this characterization when Peter and Wendy come home to dinner late, then announce that they have indulged themselves on “strawberry ice cream and hot dogs” (245) at a carnival. This event adds a quality of gluttonous self-indulgence to their characters.
The nursery is the center of Peter and Wendy’s world and has instilled in them a taste for hedonism and instant gratification. There, they can conjure up whatever world suits their fancy. The nursery isolates them from the world of adults, allowing them to create their own independent reality. Peter “never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother” (247), showing the depersonalizing effect of this world of pleasure. The children are also shown to be casual liars, professing not to be aware of the veldt and attempting to conceal it from their parents by changing the nursery scene.
The story treats Peter and Wendy as a unit. However, Peter is slightly more well-developed as a character than Wendy, owing to the prominent scene that he shares with his father (247-48). There, he expresses disgust at the idea of taking a break from technology. Even simple tasks like tying his shoes and brushing his teeth unaided by machines have become inconceivable to him. He threatens his father, manipulates him, orders him around, and snaps at him (247). It is as if the child’s and adult’s roles have been reversed. Later, when told of plans to take a vacation, both children throw a spoiled tantrum: “The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture” (250).
While seemingly innocent at first, the children’s selfish hedonism has murderous consequences. Bradbury hints at their capacity for plotting together at their entrance when he states that they are holding hands (245). On Page 251, Peter, in a fit of rage, wishes death on his father. The children eventually plot together to have their parents killed and enjoy their fantasy world in self-centered peace. At story’s end, they are eating a picnic lunch a few feet away from the site of their parents’ grisly demise.
David McClean
McClean, a trusted friend of the Hadley family, acts as a moral conscience and voice of reason. As a psychologist, he reflects the position of respect generally accorded that profession in the mid-20th century. True to his surname, McClean performs a cleansing function, urging the Hadleys to abandon the evils of their modern home. The name “David,” recalling the biblical King David, suggests such qualities as wisdom, authority, seniority, and prophesy—it is McClean who warns George of the dangers of the nursery, backing this up with his authority as a man of science. If the nursery represents the negative side of scientific progress—a regress back to the primitive state of man—McClean represents the humane and beneficial side of scientific knowledge.
At the end of the story, McClean is left alone with the two children, suggesting the enduring nature of wisdom and learning and opening the possibility that he will adopt the children and correct their wayward behavior. In fact, McClean had earlier stated to George that he can “make good children out of bad in a year” (249).
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