Two Views of Modern Humans as Animals

The two countries marked by eighteenth-century revolutions that, in part, initiated the modern era, in America and in France, would also be marked by two evolving perspectives towards modern humans by the 1850's. In the novel Madame Bovary, the French writer Gustave Flaubert artistically weaves the seduction of the married Emma Bovary by the libertine Rudolfe as an alleviation from the crushing banality of bourgeois provincial life. In contrast to the passionate Madame Bovary, in the following passage, Flaubert goes on to describe a peasant woman who’s just won the medal for fifty-four years of service on the same farm:

Her thin face, swathed in a simple hood, was more creased and wrinkled than a withered russet apple, and from the sleeves of her red camisole there dangled a pair of long hands, with bony knuckles. The dust from the barn, the soda for washing and the grease from the wool had made them so crusted, cracked, calloused, that they looked grimy even though they had been rinsed in fresh water; and, from long service, they stayed half unclasped, almost as though to set forth of themselves the simple testimony of so much affliction endured. A hint of monastic rigidity intensified the look on her face. No touch of sadness of affection softened that pale gaze. Living close to the animals, she had assumed their wordless placid state of being.

In contrast to what’s going on in France where Flaubert describes the peasant woman as an animal to exhibit the banal, Whitman embraces and celebrates people as animals to exhibit the divine, in "Song of Myself" and reflected here in the poem “Me Imperterbe”(somewhat misconfigured):

Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irra-
tional things,
Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,
Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles,
crimes, less important than I thought,
Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the
Tennnessee, or far north or inland,
A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of
these States or of the coast, or the lakes of Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for
contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

While Flaubert's view is disparaging of humans as animals, Whitman is embracing humans as animals. Yet Whitman's vision would become eclipsed and it is a view we're still trying to recover.