ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the previous chapter’s exploration of anxieties concerning mortality by exploring another key concern running through Bradbury’s Elliott Family stories: technology and the influence of post-war consumer capitalism. The chapter opens with a reference to a 1980 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, where Bradbury explained that his opinions on technology were “mixed”. He argued that “an automobile is a destroying mechanism and it’s also a happiness machine, depending on how it’s used”. He urged his fellow authors to “examine both sides” of technology “and then write perhaps a third story, which will give us solutions combining both, so that we can get away from the nightmare and move toward the delights in the future”. When Bradbury wrote about the Elliotts of Illinois—a rural family of monsters—he used a nightmare to balance readers’ perspectives on technology. This paper demonstrates how the innovations Bradbury described in From the Dust Returned and independent short stories featuring the Elliott Family othered and captivated his supernatural protagonists. Their experiences mirrored the conflicted relationships that Americans developed with new machines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the Elliotts perceived technology as antithetical to the traditions they carried from ancient corners of the world, it could also inspire awe. Frequently, modern Americans transfigured innovations into monsters that embodied the evils of the unknown. Younger members of the Elliott Family craved new strategies to frighten humans who were becoming increasingly desensitized to the aging parlor tricks of their parents. Technology supplied the scare tactics of tomorrow. Unlike most scholars, who examine Bradbury’s descriptions of technology in dystopian or futuristic settings, this chapter illuminates the author’s own experiences with innovations in rural America. Ultimately, the Elliott Family interacts with much of what Bradbury did throughout decades defined by the rapid evolution of American capitalism. By telling their stories, he recounted his own entanglements with large-scale systemic change in a small town.
