Abuse of Fictional Children

I am going to start with the assertion that Harry is an abused child – see the Dursleys for some discussion on just how much and in what ways this is true. That it is true to at least some extent I will take as a given, I find it essentially undeniable.

The only real question is how does he survive it? How much of his personality is in fact reflective of, to be brutally honest, damage, how much is innate, how much is resilience, how much is residual from the first year when he was loved? Some of it, how much is impossible to estimate, will be hard to explain with those answers. Some of his personality will need some sort of hand-wavy answer of “the story requires it for his character to work” (or in other words, this is a made up character who is simply not realistic). Any attempt to make it less impossible essentially requires something along the lines of his mother’s sacrifice not just magically protected him from Tom, but also magically protected him from the worst of the effects of his upbringing.

Another author looking at this topic had some key insights. “Sometimes realistic psychology doesn’t make a good story.”¹ He elaborates about his experiences in researching background material for one of his own characters and reading psychology as a result.
In doing so, he notes that the things that the character he had in mind would likely experience would be traumatic. In his research, he found the effects of this trauma would also in some cases be horrific. The experience left him feeling disgusted with himself, and with the vision of the potential character. The author continues:

I wouldn’t want to live for a page with a character like that, let alone for a whole book.

So I threw out the idea of realism and went with idealism. It’s my book and I want my readers to love my main character despite her rough edges²

Nor is this unique to either Rowling or the author I reference here. Charles Dickens, writing in Oliver Twist, clearly faced the same dilemma and the same conclusion, as his protagonist faces an even more unambiguously abusive situation with equal resiliency (as compared to Harry in this series). Kipling’s work, Kim faces severe neglect rather than physical or emotional abuse (not that neglect cannot rise to the level of a form of child abuse, but of a different sort/kind), but again shows unexpected health/resiliency. Jane, in Jane Eyre is probably damaged, but in ways such that it is hard to tell how much is because of the abusive home, or the horrific school, and how much the thread of Calvinism that weaves through the Bronte sisters' writing. On the other hand, Sanderson writing in his Mistborn series has Vin, who does suffer from the effects of her trauma, with severe trust issues and bouts of paranoia. Different authors have allowed the past to colour their characters' personalities to differing degrees as the needs of their differing stories dictate.

And that’s important to remember. These are works of fiction, and nothing can ultimately be trusted to be real. In fact, we do not want it to be too real, we want our characters to be better/healthier than they should be. The alternative is horrific.

A Slightly Divergent Hypothesis

Don’t Touch Me by ivybelle explores (as a one-shot from when Harry and Ginny are dating) the idea that perhaps Harry is simply really really good at hiding his reactions.³

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/the-mistborn-saga-the-original-trilogy/