Il la fait habiller en homme (perte d'identité de genre), ... DÉSHUMANISATION - Sandra: je dirais DÉFÉMINISATION
Elle souffre le martyre à chaque balade à cheval, ...
French Instagrammer and fairytale geek Nutthelo on the mandsdragt scene. She sees the prince's decision to put the Little Foundling in a suit as a way to make her lose her gender identity (she was far more feminine until then) and calls it dehumanisation. I would say it is rather defeminisation, loss of a feminine identity... Nuthelo agrees with Jacob Bøggild that the Prince is doing it to protect his own straight male sexuality from temptation...
and I add that the character is a teen who is discovering her gender and sexuality. Maybe she is, like Brienne of Tarth and others, a cisgender teen tomboy? Both Brienne and the Little Foundling are in unrequited love with handsome young men (though the Prince loves the Convent Girl and Renly loves Loras, a boy).
Also, even if the Victorian/Biedermeier era was far more patriarchal, the Little Foundling is, just like she explores her body and identity, exploring the land kingdom with all the freedom that her suit/mandsdragt allows her, through outdoor activities like horseback riding and mountaineering (even though those activities were masculine-coded back then). She is, like Queen Christina, Julie d'Aubigny, Eugénie Danglars... a New Woman before New Women existed, a Proto-New Woman.
But the Little Mermaid was an introverted girly-girl as a child, and the most spirited (dynamic, we world say tomboyish) back then, her spiritual predecessor, was one of her older siblings, the Third Sister (yaaaay! New Andersen character introduced!) who was the one who ventured deepest into the human realm until the Little Mermaid changed species, and also the first to come into contact with humans.
Illustrations by blog_mellow: in his version the Third Sister looks like Ariel, while the Little Mermaid/Foundling is platinum blonde. The setting is Biedermeier (as usual); when we reach the mandsdragt scene, I will analyse her outfit once more...
The Third Sister, as a teen, swam up a river that empties itself into the ocean (it was summer, she had to cool her face by plunging it time and again); she came across hilly riverbanks with palaces, manors, forests, and vineyards (I headcanon this as the Loire Valley because 1) the Loire empties itself into the Atlantic; 2) the summer there is burning hot; 3) the landscape is the same, Renaissance châteaux and manors, forest, and vineyards), on the top of the riverbank hills).
In a little creek, the Third Sister came across some human children splashing around, and she played with them (neither party was afraid, both of them were curious), until the bark of their pet puppy drove her away at breakneck speed, back into the ocean. That, and the fresh water didn't agree with her marine system.
Andersen says that the Third Sister never forgot about her adventures, especially about the human kids who could swim so well without having tails (and who were as little afraid of her as she was afraid of them). It was a loud noise that drove her away, something unheard of underwater. I headcanon the Third Sister as being the Little Mermaid's favourite sibling and the one she most admired, the one whose adventures she listened the most to, the one who inspired her to collect thingamabobs from shipwrecks and, years later, to explore both her identity and the land kingdom through horseback riding and mountaineering in a bespoke man's suit (ignoring that her one true love did so in order to defeminise her and protect himself from temptation)...
"No male shall ever put on female's clothing; neither shall ever a female put on male's clothing, for both of these are Abominations unto the LORD." Deuteronomy 22:5.
This taboo is still held today by many patriarchal, conservative religions, especially evangelical cults like Jehovah's Witnesses or Remnant Bride. In some of these cults, women are not allowed to wear trousers in Church; in others, they're not allowed to wear trousers AT ALL (but in none of those cults can women SPEAK during the service because Saint Paul said so: Corinthians 14:34)...
And gays, lesbians, queers... have it even WORSE than straight women. Remnant Bride even claims that ladies' jeans were invented by SATAN... One of their worst rants against gender deviance is this essay on HYENAS, foul-smelling scavengers yet matriarchal and pseudo-hermaphroditic, that dynamic women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Schiller's sans-culottes were always compared to...
The hyena essay (take this with a grain of salt - evangelical propaganda!):
https://www.remnantbride.com/hyena/spotted.htm
The Schiller fragment - Marianna Wertz translation:
Then wives into hyenas growing
Do make with horror jester’s art,
Still quiv’ring, panther’s teeth employing,
They rip apart the enemy’s heart.
Sir Terry Pratchett famously satirises at once war, the patriarchy, and homophobia in his most glorious Discworld novel, Monstrous Regiment, set in a Ruritanian land where nearly all the men have been either killed or imprisoned in a decades-long war, leading many brave women to join the army en travesti, even though they risk eternal damnation due to a sacred text full of arbitrary laws (including Deuteronomy 22:5, of course).
The premise of Monstrous Regiment reminds me of Chamsous-Sabah, ruling her land as a coloured child of eight or nine because she was the last one left standing, just because of her age and gender:
"All the men in my family have either been poisoned or killed in battle, either against enemies or against each other. It's sad, but existence has got to come to an end..."
