Moreover, in virtue of his marriage with the queen, Claudius now really stands in the old king's place; in killing him, therefore, Hamlet is to his own unconscious mind becoming guilty of the very crime of Œdipus which had tempted him before his father's death; hence the resistance to the consummation of the act which hatred of the interloper prompts him to perform. [Sidenote: The wicked step-mother in fairy tales] In the case of a girl, corresponding feelings may be called up towards her step-mother on the re-marriage of her father--feelings which have found expression in the very numerous and familiar myths and fairy tales (such as those of Cinderella, Snow White, Mother Holle), of the wicked step-mother who kills, beats, neglects, falsely accuses, drives out or otherwise ill-treats her step-daughter[113]. Here the feelings of the girl, like those of the boy under similar circumstances, are given free vent towards the step-mother, where they were formerly inhibited by emotions of an opposite character (or at least repressed by considerations of general or traditional morality) in the case of the girl's true mother; the step-mother thus serving as an object capable at once of arousing, and of becoming the recipient of, hostile and jealous feelings, which had hitherto successfully been held in check. [Sidenote: The attitude of step-parents towards their step-children] These feelings of hostility on the part of children to their step-parents are of course bound to call up some degree of reciprocal feeling on the part of the step-parents themselves. The feelings thus aroused, however, are often reinforced by more direct causes of hostility, such as are liable to affect in any case the attitude of parent towards child (_Cp._ Ch. XVI). Here, however, the absence of the real bond of parenthood, with its accompanying incentives to tender feeling, may easily cause the hostile tendencies to meet with less resistance than usual so that genuinely cruel or neglectful behaviour is more likely to occur. [Sidenote: The displacement of love on to step-parents]