In Ray Bradbury' story "The Veldt" the Hadley family purchase an automated home that does every human activity most people do, from cleaning, to cooking, to even tying shoes!
Keep in mind that this story was published in the year 1950. The fact that it has remained so relevant over six decades later is what makes it a "classic."
Back to the story. One of the features of this futuristic mega home is the nursery, which responds to
the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire
Therefore, not only does the home do everything for the kids, it also allows them to project their fantasies, however raw they are, and make them their instant reality.
The issue that continuously comes up in the story is that the home does everything for everyone and spoils the owners of the home as...
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well as the children.
The home spoils them so much that the Hadleys have lost control of their children. Moreover, the children are fixated with their nursery, which lately has become an African veldt, complete with wild and hungry lions.
Something was not right with these children, and the nursery has become their father and mother. When the parents decide to shut down the nursery, and the rest of the house, the kids cannot handle their frustration over it.
In the words of their friend, the psychologist David McClean:
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.
Therefore, there is a lot of hatred in the minds of the children at the prospect of their nursery being shut down. The hatred is directed toward their parents, and they have produced a "telepathic emanation" from their mind which visualizes the lions killing their parents and eating them away.
A foreshadowing of this occurs when Mr. Hadley finds something in the veldt that makes no sense and shows that the children's "telepathic emanations" have been hard at work:
“What is that?” [Mrs. Hadley] asked. “An old wallet of mine,” he said. He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it bad been chewed, and there were blood smears on both sides..
Hence, the screams that the Hadleys keep hearing coming from the veldt are their own screams, projected into the future, when the fantasy finally comes true and the children get away with getting rid of their parents for good.
The screaming noises coming from the nursery at the beginning of "The Veldt" are the eventual screams of George and Lydia Hadley, as imagined by their children Wendy and Peter.
The primary setting in "The Veldt," is the children's nursery, which was constructed by HappyLife Home and was "forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high" and "cost half again as much as the rest of the house." This room is able to tap into the desires of the children and project their imaginings in the room, which is then able to stimulate each of the five senses.
One of the children's imaginings included "a faraway scream" that "sound familiar" within this African veldt, which is filled with lions and giraffes and the like. Later in the story, the narrator reveals who this scream came from: the parents themselves. Right before being eaten by the lions, the narrator says, George and Lydia suddenly "realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.” It's because those screams were their screams.
This wish for death on the Hadleys is foreshadowed early on when the two sit at dinner and George thinks about the death thoughts of his children. He thinks, "Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.” So the children, who were angry at their parents for attempting to take away their true caregiver (the house) wish death on their biological parents. This fantasy is played out behind closed doors in the nursery and becomes a reality when Wendy and Peter lock George and Lydia inside.