Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Veldt," explores the results of parents who spoil their children and rely on technology to take the place of family. In this story, George and Lydia Hadley have purchased a Happylife Home. The house does everything for the family such as cooking meals, doing laundry, and even tying the children's shoes. Lydia says, "The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid" (para 55). By allowing the house to take over parental duties, the mother and father have lost control of their two children, Peter and Wendy.
The children's nursery is a technologically advanced room where Peter and Wendy are able to fantasize a setting and a situation, and it becomes reality. For awhile now, the room has become an African veldt with ominous creatures such as lions who are eating the remains of something and vultures circling overhead. George and...
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Lydia have been terrified to enter the room and become worried about the children's fantasies.
Unfortunately, George's old wallet complete with blood stains and lion saliva as well as Lydia's bloody scarf are found in the nursery. These objects foreshadow the dreadful death the children have wished upon their parents for threatening to close down the Happylife Home.
The two bloody objects that are found in the nursery in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt” are a wallet and a scarf. The wallet belongs to the father of the family in the story, George Hadley. The scarf belongs to his wife, Lydia.
Although we are not explicitly told this, it appears that the Hadley children, Peter and Wendy, have in some way been pretending to have the lions kill their parents in the nursery. They might have brought their parents’ belongings into the nursery to make the nursery’s versions of their parents seem more real. Or maybe they wanted to teach the lions the scents of their parents so that they could later have the lions actually kill them.
One way or another, these two bloody items are a sort of foreshadowing. They help us to understand that something terrible is going to happen to the parents in this story.