Life Before Man

Life Before Man is a 1979 novel by Canadian author
Margaret Atwood. Set in 1970s Ontario Canada it is a
modern update on a nineteenth-century “novel of manners”
which explores the complex interpersonal lives of its main
characters in terms of their underlying moral beliefs. The
novel follows a couple in a failing marriage Elizabeth and
Nate as well as Lesje Elizabeth’s coworker at the Royal
Ontario Museum—with whom Nate is having an affair. Atwood
focuses on Lesje’s fluid identity which is unconstrained
by the norms and expectations of marital life and mixed
family ancestry. A wandering soul Lesje struggles with
feelings of alienation. The novel interrogates modern
existential questions of whether or not certain structures
and narratives are needed to live a happy life. This
question is reflected in the book’s rhetorical title which
posits humanity before or outside the Biblical narratives
that prevail today. Life Before Man is told from the
perspectives of Nate Elizabeth and Lesje. It begins with
Elizabeth in the autumn of 1976. Elizabeth’s lover Chris
has recently committed suicide. Elizabeth’s grief is
immense; she no longer knows whether her life has meaning
comparing herself to a “peeled snail.” She remains in an
open marriage with Nate but their relationship is no
longer sexual. Still they agreed to tell each other about
their various affairs. For reasons she does not entirely
understand Elizabeth had kept her affair with Chris
secret; now she feels unable to ask for the support she
needs from her husband. Chris and Elizabeth had met at the
Royal Ontario Museum where Elizabeth works in special
projects and Chris worked as an assistant paleontologist.
Shortly before Chris killed himself with his shotgun
Elizabeth had called off their affair explaining that she
felt unable to fulfill Chris’s desire to deepen it into a
real relationship while she was married to Nate. Thus
Elizabeth partly feels that she is to blame for Chris’s
suicide. While Elizabeth grieves Nate decides to break up
with Martha hoping that it will improve things between
Elizabeth and him. Instead they revert to a trivial and
joyless existence pantomiming the routines of marriage
without deep connection. Nate meets Lesje and they begin
an affair. He gets her to break up with her boyfriend
William. He and Elizabeth ultimately agree to divorce.
Toward the end of the novel Lesje announces that she
stopped taking her birth control pills and has become
pregnant. Disliking the tension and difficulty of her new
life she yearns to be with William again. Nate ends his
stint as a woodworker and returns to corporate law in
order to support his two families. Elizabeth is stuck in a
difficult emotional state: “not lonely” but “single and
alone.” She tries once to have an intimate encounter but
ends up fooling around with her partner in an empty
parking lot as if a teenager again. Ultimately none of the
characters in Life Before Man find happiness. Atwood
suggests that modern life is doomed to beget
disappointment after disappointment as people discard
intimacy and the institutions that bind them together
groping in the darkness for lost meaning.