The setting of “The Veldt” is the Hadley’s home, although this is not a family home as we would recognize it today. Their futuristic home is controlled by automated, state-of-the-art technology that makes the scenery in the massive nursery transform depending on the children’s mood and what they are thinking about. The nursery, which is something of an obsession for the Hadley children, is currently showcasing, through virtual reality, an African savannah scene. The technological capabilities of this smart home mean that the sights, sounds, and smells perceived in the nursery will lead the occupants to feel like they are in Africa.
For all the benefits that the smart home offers George and Lydia Hadley, it comes with the remarkable disadvantage that the Hadleys can no longer connect with their children at all, as they have become completely swept up into the virtual worlds offered by the smart home technology. The children’s feelings of animosity towards their parents are reflected in the African veldt scene, which is fraught with dangers.
The children, Wendy and Peter (arguably named after Wendy and Peter from Peter Pan), have been imprinting their thoughts about death onto the African veldt images in their nursery. This virtual reality suddenly becomes actual reality, and their parents are eaten by a lion in their African veldt scene.
Further Reading
Although Bradbury does not explicitly tell the reader what year the story takes place in, we can discern that the setting is sometime in the future. Given the latest advancements in home technology, one could more accurately determine that the story takes place in the near future. In regards to the physical setting of the story, the story takes place in the Hadley family's technologically advanced Happylife Home. The story is also set in virtual Africa, which is inside the family's expensive, three-dimensional nursery.
The Happylife Home is an automated, futuristic house that cooks, cleans, and performs nearly every function the family needs. George and Lydia Hadley bought the home to make their lives significantly easier and please their entitled children. However, George and Lydia regret purchasing the smart home because they feel useless and cannot connect with their children.
The other main setting of the story is in virtual Africa, which is located in the smart home's nursery. The nursery has telekinetic capabilities and projects realistic images onto high-definition walls, which reflect the children's thoughts. The nursery uses virtual reality to display any setting or images that the children can dream of. As of late, Wendy and Peter have been thinking about death. Their disturbing thoughts are displayed onto the nursery's walls in the form of the African veldt, which is a threatening, desolate place where lions roam. The nursery ends up becoming too real, and George and Lydia Hadley lose their lives inside the African veldt.
Further Reading
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The second primary setting of the story is the nursery, which displays realistic images from the floor to the ceiling of anything the children are thinking. The massive nursery is forty feet wide and thirty feet high, and the Hadley children spend the majority of their leisure time experiencing the various settings they imagine. Lately, the nursery has transformed into a hostile African veldt, which reflects Peter and Wendy's animosity towards their parents.
One can consider the threatening, dangerous African veldt a third setting in the story. Tragically, George and Lydia cannot repair their relationship with their children, who lock them inside the nursery, where the three-dimensional lions come to life and devour them. Bradbury's story is a cautionary tale about over-reliance on technology and the importance of disciplining children.
The setting of "The Veldt" is a futuristic house called a "Happylife Home"—the narrator describes it as "costing thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them." Much of the story revolves around a particular room, however, called "the nursery," a kind of three-dimensional television that works by telepathy.
The story problematizes the idea of setting, however, by introducing the question of realism. Although the story literally takes place in the Happylife Home, the life the Hadley family lives there is more make-believe than real, since machines do everything for them. Lydia asks George to "turn the house off" so they can go back to taking care of themselves, that is, live life without the mediation of technology. The nursery, and Wendy and Peter's evocation of Africa in the nursery, becomes a kind of alternate, and hostile, setting, one in which technology ironically makes it possible to experience nature. The parents' desire for a "real" life is countered by the children's imagined reality of Africa, which, the end of the story hints, might be the more real of the two.
The entire story takes place within the "Happy-life Home" of George and Lydia and their children Wendy and Peter. This story takes place in the future, and the Happy-life Home is an electronically-controlled house that fullfils every need of the people who live in it. Part of the house, the nursery, works by telepathy, creating an environment that the people in the room most desire. This area of the house becomes the focal point of action, but the whole of the story unfolds within the house in various rooms.