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.