The Golden Key to the Nursery Room

December 3, 2009

Filed under Samuel M.

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Wonderland and The Veldt
Earlier this year, the students of Mr. Long were lucky enough to be exposed to a story written by Ray Bradbury.  The title of this story was The Veldt. If you want a link to the PDF copy of this story, you can find it here.
The reason I bring this up is because there are similarities in the stories. For starters, both stories are about children. In both stories, said children escape to a dream world. In Alice’s case it is Wonderland. In Peter and Wendy’s case (the children from the Veldt) it is the nursery. When the children from both stories want to escape reality they enter their respective dreamworlds (Wonderland/Nursery).

Now let me go more in depth. Since version of The Veldt we read was a short story, I cannot fully compare it to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I do, however, believe it is safe to say if you think about it hard enough, you can draw parallels between the stories. In The Veldt, the children, Peter and Wendy, do not like the way their parents are treating them. To suppress their true feelings toward their parents, the go to the Nursery room. In this room, the children can think about any place on earth and everything in the room is manipulated to fit that environment. As a way of letting out their anger, Peter and Wendy imagine themselves in Africa. Everything is perfect. The animals are realistic, the heat, grass, and sounds are all normal. The only abnormal thing about this Africa are the ‘holograms’ of the parents are killed by the lions. This is how the two children expressed their anger. They would go into the Nursery room and imagine the death of their parents by a pack of lions. This is how they escaped their reality.

Although Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is not gruesome and creepy like The Veldt, certain aspects of The Veldt can be seen in the story (Alice). In the beginning of the story, Alice was sitting under a tree with nothing to do. She was so bored and tired she didn’t even want to get up and make a daisy-chain. She ended up falling asleep and dreaming about a mystical place we call Wonderland. In Wonderland she would do fun things and have great adventures, even if it was an imagination/dream.

To summarize everything, Alice’s boredom would be equivalent to Peter and Wendy’s parents. Alice’s Wonderland would be equivalent to the Nursery room. The adventures Alice had to pacify her boredom would be equivalent to Peter and Wendy imagining their parents dying (as creepy as that sounds).

Disagree or Agree? Tell me why or why not in the comments below!