Stepmother: Tales with female heroes have stepmothers. If they had mothers, they wouldn't have dangerous adventures, with all the implied unpleasantnesses, since their own mothers would be there to protect them, and to set up their bright future (in the perfect world of folk tales). The stepmother is therefore the unloving, uncaring, mother-figure who makes the quest possible in the first place: some element of the tale must precipitate the hero's departure, and a true mother would never throw her daughter out of the house.

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