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Abusive Parents/Literature: Difference between revisions
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* [[Evil Matriarch|Mama Elena]] from [[Like Water for Chocolate]]. She is constantly controlling to her youngest daughter, Tita, and forbids Tita to marry the man she loves so Tita can care for Elena when she's old just because it's tradition.
* [[Roald Dahl]]'s ''[[Matilda (Literature)|Matilda]]'' has this and neglect; they call her names and deride her for not being like them (she prefers to read, they watch endless, brainless television). At one point, her father rips up one of her library books while calling it trash. Also, her parents leave her (a five year old) alone on afternoons when they are at work or bingo. But even they take a back seat to [[Evil Teacher|the Trunchbull]], who is a [[Complete Monster]] through and through.
* [[Darkness Visible|William Marsh's]] father is a brute, though how much of one is only gradually made [[Scars Are Forever|clear]]. Lewis is so shocked about it that the abuse is never, ever played for [[Dude, Not Funny|laughs]].
* In [[Tanith Lee]]'s ''The Silver Metal Lover'', Jane, the heroine, discovers that her mother {{spoiler|futzed with her phenotype to make Jane plainer than she should have been because she didn't want the competition}}. The reader sees all along how her mother passively-aggressively manipulates and undermines Jane at every opportunity. She also {{spoiler|arranges for the destruction of Jane's android sweetie}} because Jane was growing up: growing *away* from her.
* Tywin Lannister of [[George RR Martin]]'s ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]''. He treated his youngest son like crap for years, culminating in forcing him to watch -- and in the end, participate in -- the gang-rape of his new wife because she was a commoner.
** Samwell Tarly's father takes [[Why Couldn't You Be Different?]] to extreme levels, openly despising his son for his bookishness and lack of badassitude. After years of trying to make him shape up through means such as forcing him to constantly wear chainmail and slaughtering a bull and making him [[Blood Bath|bathe in its blood]], he fathered a second son who he liked more. So he threatened Sam with a "hunting accident" if he didn't join the Night's Watch, thus giving up his inheritance to his younger brother.
** Cersei Lannister has shades of this, too. She loves her children, but clearly favors Joffrey, the eldest and a [[Complete Monster]]. After {{spoiler|he dies and his kinder, gentler brother Tommen takes over the throne, Cersei constantly compares him to Joffrey, and uses him as a puppet so that she can act as queen. She goes as far as to ''force him to beat his whipping boy'' when Tommen refuses to obey her out of love for his new wife, whom Cersei hates. Tommen is ''8.''}}
* Jaqueline Wilson's ''Lola Rose'' has Jayni talk about how her dad beats up her mum whenever he gets angry or suspicious, and constantly threatens her, and how he inevitably hits Jayni hard at the start of the book for the first time. Jayni repeatedly talks about how scared she is of her dad, even when he's miles away.
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* Felice in the ''Pliocene Exile Saga'' by Julian May. Introduced as a sadist and violent sociopath, it's revealed that her parents sated their boredom and idle lust with her, and otherwise thoroughly neglected her. She later gains her all-consuming power {{spoiler|after being sexually tortured, stripping her mind to a bare core of personality and conveniently also removing all her mental blocks. An attempt to heal her mind succeeds in making her sane, but it was far too little, far too late to save her soul. In the end, she's removed from the game via her mind being trapped in a crystal along with her torturer, condemned to torture each other forever.}}
* [[Stephen King]]'s ''Dolores Claiborne'' had a husband who, in addition to physically abusing the title character, had a decidedly unwholesome interest in their teenage daughter Selena, who suffered sexual abuse at his hands in addition to [[Manipulative Bastard|manipulation]] into being afraid of her mother in order to keep her from talking about it. It is this, along with the stealing of their children's college money in order to spite her, that would ultimately lead to Dolores's decision to murder him.
* In another King novel, ''Gerald's Game'', Jessie (the protagonist) was sexually molested by her father once. This was especially traumatizing to her because until then, they had [[
* [[Complete Monster|Lord Raith]] of ''[[The Dresden Files]]'' rapes his daughters when they start to be a threat to his position. The Raiths are [[Horny Devils|White Court vampires]], so it gives him supernatural control over his children as well. {{spoiler|[[The Vamp|Lara]] [[Hoist By His Own Petard|turned the tables on him]] and kept this fate from falling upon her youngest sister Inari.}}
* In Russell Banks's ''The Sweet Hereafter'' (and the critically acclaimed film adaptation by Atom Egoyan), 15-year-old Nicole Burnell is molested regularly by her father. Following the accident around which the plot of the book revolves, which leaves her paralysed, she even expresses some relief that he won't find her attractive any more.
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** Voldemort's mother, Merope Gaunt, also definitely suffered some level of parental abuse. Some fans interpret it as going [[Parental Incest|even further]].
* In ''[[Cloud of Sparrows]]'', Emily was raped by her [[Wicked Stepmother|evil stepfather]], and her brothers were regularly whipped and beaten at the slightest pretext.
* Eve Dallas of the ''[[In Death]]'' series. Eve's mother was a prostitute who resented Eve's very ''existence''; her father beat, starved and raped her regularly, with plans to sell her to pedophiles, until she killed him at the tender age of ''eight''. Hers is a [[Line
** If that wasn't enough in the long [[Break the Cutie|cutie break]] that was her childhood, she winds up with Trudy Lombard, who had a ''pattern'' of fostering girls, treating them like slaves, forcing them to take ice-cold showers (the reason Eve takes 100+ degree ones), and so on. It was bad enough that just ''seeing'' Lombard again (she had come to [[Blackmail]] Eve and Roarke) hit her like a [[Shell
** Roarke himself received regular physical and financial abuse from his father, and his hatred for the man is one of the things which motivated him on his way from being a petty street-thief to topping the [[Fiction 500]].
* In the ''[[Deepgate Codex]]'' series, {{spoiler|the god Ulcis}}' abuse of his daughter {{spoiler|Carnival}} lists so heavily on the ''holy shit'' meter that it might as well be breaking it. He only kept her mother alive so that he could rape her to his enjoyment, and was ''not'' pleased when she got pregnant, especially because as an angel's mother, she died in childbirth. Although he named his daughter Rebecca, he more commonly referred to her as a freak or with expletives--she {{spoiler|calls herself Carnival as in ''carnival freak'', and [[Berserk Button|WILL NOT]] be referred to as anything else}}. He had his soldiers gang-rape her often and very brutally; when years of this treatment didn't break her, he executed a vicious [[Mind Rape]] on her and ''hanged her from Deepgate's chains''. She got loose -- as a rather psychotic amnesiac. {{spoiler|It wasn't for 3000 years, until Carnival finally got acceptance and kinship from Dill and Rachel (and bloodily killed Ulcis), that she finally started to calm down a little.}}
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* ''Ironman'' has a minor and a major example. The minor example is the main character's father, whose extremely strict discipline policies, while ultimately well intentioned, end up being a major contributor to the main character's anger issues and inferiority complex. He eventually gets better. The major example is {{spoiler|Hudgie's father, a psychotic, [[Complete Monster|inhuman]] sociopath who regularly ''tortured'' his son for even the most minor offenses. Thankfully, he's finally arrested for his atrocities towards the end of the book.}} Unfortunately, the semi-sequel ''Angry Management'' reveals that {{spoiler|Hudgie killed himself shortly after ''Ironman''.}}
** Any Chris Crutcher novel will have at least one character go through this; it's damn near his trademark. [[Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped|Doesn't make it any less effective.]]
* The novel ''The Nature of the Daughters'' by [[Awesome McCoolname|Elizadeth Hetherington]] features a female protagonist, Renata Savannah, that suffers all but sexual abuse at the hands of her mother, a woman who has repeatedly tried to kill her. Her mother even enlists her [[Evil Twin|twin sister]] to aid in the murder. Given that this is a coming-of-age novel about [[
* In Mary Downing Hahn's ''Daphne's Book,'' the protagonist Jessica discovers that Daphne and her little sister are orphaned and live with their grandmother. Said grandmother is mentally unstable and unemployed--she feeds all the food in the house to [[Crazy Cat Lady|her many, many cats]] instead of eating it herself or feeding her grand-daughters, she screams and throws tantrums in the grocery store when Daphne tries to buy a particular food item they need, is horribly neglectful, tells Daphne to her face that she "sent her father away" (in reality, he was killed in Vietnam), and terrifies the younger, kindergarten-aged girl by saying the ceiling will fall on them and kill them all. She also forbids the younger girl from going to school, calling it useless, and Daphne herself misses many days of school to take care of Grandma and her sister.
* Shallan's father in ''[[The Stormlight Archive (Literature)|The Stormlight Archive]]'' was violent, quick to anger, and got the entire family into debt with extremely powerful people. He also really screwed up his three sons, but left Shallan alone. {{spoiler|Didn't stop her from killing him.}}
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* In the short story ''Parting Jane'', a young girl is being harvested for parts to save her sick sister. Her parents don't seem to care about Jane at all, only the sick girl. Unfortunately this can be [[Truth in Television]].
* In ''[[Purple Hibiscus (Literature)|Purple Hibiscus]]'' Kambili and her brother Jaja are often physically hurt by their father - whipped and scalded, but also forced into a strict, oppressive form of Catholicism. Kambili hardly speaks and never laughs - at least until her Aunt and Cousin get fed up with that.
* ''[[The Night Circus]]'' has two prominent examples: Mr. Alexander H--, who isolates the orphan he plucks out of the street for uninterrupted study for about a decade and then, once the child has grown into a man, essentially vanishes from his life. There's also Hector Bowen, who never hesitates to tell [[Mad
* In ''Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs Dunphrey,'' the sixteen-year-old protagonist suffers abuse from both her parents. her father, who left the family years earlier, was emotionally abusive and tried to pass it off as [["Just Joking" Justification|just kidding around]], and physically abusive--one of his last actions before running out on them was shoving his daughter so hard he knocked her out. The mother is neglectful, sitting around and being useless, letting her daughter parent her ten-year-old brother, and then finally just runs away from home without so much of a note, leaving her children to starve and freeze for a few weeks until the protagonist finally decides to tell someone what's happening.
* [[The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|Huckleberry Finn]]'s [[The Alcoholic|alcoholic]] dad beats him, verbally abuses him, takes his money to buy whiskey, leaves him to live on the streets, and at one point kidnaps him and keeps him hidden in the woods. In ''[[The Adventures of Tom Sawyer]]'' it's implied that he also abused Huck's [[Missing Mom|late mother]]--"They used to fight all the time."
* In [[Gene Stratton Porter]]'s ''Literature/Freckles'', Freckles is horribly afraid that his parents were this, and otherwise disreputable, and so he comes of bad blood.
{{quote| ''Does it seem to you that anyone would take a newborn baby and row over it, until it was bruised black, cut off its hand, and [[Door
* In [[The 39 Clues]], this is most certainly the case with Ian and Natalie Kabra. {{spoiler|Their mother Isabel is a [[Complete Monster]] who verbally degrades them on a regular basis, and it's left unclear whether their father treats them similarly or whether he simply doesn't notice or care about what Isabel does. Ian and Natalie love and fear Isabel simultaneously, while believing that they lead the perfect lives because of their family's extensive wealth.}} They'd be [[The Woobie|Woobies]] if they weren't so nasty themselves!
** Then Isabel takes it [[Up to Eleven]] in the final book of the first series, ''Into the Gauntlet'', when she {{spoiler|[[Moral Event Horizon|shoots Natalie in the foot.]]}}
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