Watching the Parents? A Brace of Short

¶ … Watching the Parents?

A brace of short stories by two of the most skilled American short story writers of the 20th century cast the family in an eerie and distressing light. For the families in these two stories are not the comforting supportive group gathered around the homely hearth giving succor to each other in bad times and sharing the joy of good times. These are families in which battle lines have been drawn and in which there is the potential for terrible harm to be done. These are families whose deadliness is most likely to be turned on each other.

In Joyce Carol Oates's story "Where are you going, Where have you been?," one of the daughters of a family is recognized by both herself and others as The Beauty. Connie -- not in any way a constant girl -- is 15 and is the beauty that her mother once was. Because of this the two are at dagger-points with each other, unlike the relationship that the mother has with Connie's dull, steady, and unattractive sister. In the constant friction of this family, Connie is wooed by a pair of strangers who appear in a golden car covered with hieroglyphs. Connie is at first intrigued by the attention that she receives from these strangers but then frightened.

At the end of the story, Connie may be assaulted -- or raped, or murdered -- by one of the strangers. What exactly happens to her is unclear. All the author tells us is that Connie thinks of her mother, wants to be protected by her mother, but it is all too late. Whatever might have been between the two of them has been squandered long before. In many ways, the story can be read as a commentary on the times when it was written: 1966, a year in the middle of a decade in which so many things were torn apart.

Most parents -- perhaps even all parents -- have had the fear at least once during their children's lives that some force outside of their control is far more important to their progeny than are they. That force might be a peer group, a coach, a boyfriend, a religious cult. For the parents in Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt," the parents are afraid of their own house. And these parents are not in fact crazy: They have every reason to be afraid of the role that technology is claiming in their children's lives.

What is most striking about this story, in fact, is that exactly a half-century ago Bradbury was so prescient about the ways in which children and parents can become alienated from each other because of technological gimmickry. In this story, the technology is not the brainchild of Steve Jobs. The technology is nothing small and pocketable at all: It is the entire smart house in which the family lives.

The story opens with the mother entering the nursery, which is also the site of the smart house's brain, which allows the house's circuitry the mind of whoever enters the room. Those mental images are then translated into images, sounds, textures, and smells onto the nursery walls. And those images -- that is, the images that are in the children's minds -- are of leonine savagery, of lions on the veldt hunting and killing and killing -- with each killing accompanied by a horribly familiar scream.

The mother becomes increasingly troubled and begins to talk to her husband about turning off the "smart" technology. But their discussions about shutting down the nursery and so taking away the presences that the children are most closely bonded with lead to tragedy as the children fight back to save the family that they love, albeit a family that is based on fantasy. Central to the story is the idea that the children can see the family dynamics more clearly than can their parents, as is foreshadowed in this scene between the father and a psychologist:

"There it is," said George Hadley. "See what you make of it."