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Importance Of Family Roles In Ray Bradbury's Happylife Home

652 Words3 Pages

Throughout the short the typical 1950s family roles are taken over by the use and reliance on technology which leads to problems throughout the household. In the beginning of the story, the parents start to acknowledge their own uselessness, apparent when: “his wife was standing in the middle of the kitchen watching the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four” (Bradbury 1). In the 1950s, a married woman takes care of the house and family by cooking and cleaning. But in the HappyLife Home where machinery takes care of all these tasks already, Lydia no longer has a role as caretaker and it starting to bother her in addition to her children no longer seeing her as a caretaker by ignoring her. The shifted dynamic of family roles is …show more content…

It is here that the readers are shown how Lydia and George as essentially useless as parents to the children as it is the children who are telling them to go ahead and eat without them. It is the children giving orders to the parents and not the other way around, which therein lies the issue: the imbalance of power within the family because of the technology; which makes the parents feel useless and the children powerful as they are the ones controlling the technology. Unfortunately, the parents were unable to shift the power back in their favor and restore the family roles; leading to fatal events in their home. All throughout the short story, Bradbury alludes to death whether subtle or not and the overall intrinsic nature of people. Bradbury describes the several settings of the nursery: Wonderland, Oz, and even the moon, but George notices the nursery’s preoccupation with the african veldt: “But now, is yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat...Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too real for ten-year- old children” (Bradbury 4). Here the readers sees that the children fantasize of death and the longer they imagine it the more realistic and

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