Elizabeth Edwards’ Passive Aggression

In the most revealing moment of her Oprah interview, Elizabeth Edwards tried to repeat the now infamous come-on—“You are so hot”—that had ensnared her husband. “I can’t deliver it. You wanna try?” she said to Oprah, and they both cracked up. Edwards was not defensive or full of rage, just mocking, as any woman of substance would be about such a cliché of a line. She recounted the story as if it had nothing to do with her—when it was, in Oprah speak, the day her world fell apart. This is what makes Edwards compelling to so many women—the ability to seem, in the same moment, invincible and also vulnerable and exposed.

The same duality runs through Resilience, Edwards’ new book about the string of calamities that have clouded the last half of her life. The book is a spectacular act of revenge and betrayal, exploiting her husband’s weakness in order to repackage herself as the heroine of her own drama, as Maureen Dowd argued. (“I am Elizabeth and I have lived an extraordinary life in nearly every sense of the word,” she declares portentously) At the same time, it’s a naked act of desperation by a woman who is daily losing control. For the watchers of Oprah (and the rest of womankind), Edwards’ story speaks to a modern woman’s fear that she can be smarter than her husband, liberated enough to speak her mind, the matriarch of a perfect family and still lose it all in a day.

On our blog, XX Factor, some contributors have picked up on [2] how Edwards absurdly portrays her husband as the passive “target” of his predatory mistress, Rielle Hunter. Edwards’ parsing of motives in the books has even stranger elements. She does not dwell on Hunter, or her husband; she barely even mentions them. Instead she portrays the whole affair as a part of her own “tragic” destiny. It’s another twist in her plot line, along with her teenage son Wade’s death in a car accident, and her diagnosis of terminal cancer.

“A little turn or two,” she writes. “And Wade is alive, and the cancer is gone, and my husband turns away from the ludicrous words, ‘You are so hot”…But we…can not turn back.”

Over and over Edwards compares herself to Tecmessa, the Greek heroine who tried to right things after her husband’s temporary bout of madness. Tecmessa utterly failed and, like all tragic heroines, wound up raging against the Fates. I waited for Edwards to quote Job, another symbol of futile resistance, and yes, pretty soon he showed up, too. Wade was 16 when a strong wind blew his car off the road. The Book of Job describes a similar incident: “Behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men and they are dead.”

In almost everything she writes, Edwards returns obsessively to the subject of Wade (“I always come back to Wade.”). In Resilience, she abstracts his death to a cruel philosophical question. “The invisible wind,” she writes. “The hand of God? The hand of Satan that God had loosened on Job?” Edwards, it seems, was done in not by anything so banal as her husband’s cheesy exchange at a bar, but by the very elements—the wind that took Wade, the unnamed mistress who is Fire.

As a political wife, Edwards was known for being anything but passive, or even passive-aggressive. When I reported a story about her for the New Republic, her staff described her as a female Bill Clinton, intimidating in her range of knowledge and mastery of the details. Staff lived in fear of her “ripping us to shreds,” said one, for mistakes like a minor error on a policy paper. They were afraid to cross her or tell her she couldn’t have what she wanted. Watching her at campaign events as she breezed through questions, connecting with the audience, you wondered why she wasn’t the one running for office.

The least generous explanation for why Edwards now fixates on forces larger than life, diminishing her own authority, is that she is ducking her own culpability. When John Edwards told her about his affair right after he announced his candidacy, he said it was a one-night stand, and she chose to believe him. She says she asked him not to run, but it’s hard to believe she pressed the point all that hard. During the campaign, she fiercely ripped into anyone who asked about the affair and also campaigned tirelessly for “the man I love.” Her complicity, Rebecca Traister writes in Salon, is “crushing to anyone with an idealized view of Elizabeth Edwards.” She was supposed to be the blunt one, the one who always told the truth even when it made things look bad.

But Edwards’ brand of truth is more complicated than that. Her truths have blind spots. Sometimes she wanders into a confession that rings almost true, and then signals that she knows she’s not telling it straight. A short time after she learned about the affair, she also learned that her cancer had returned and spread to her bones. Suddenly, she writes, “John’s indiscretion seemed a million miles away."

"Cancer was writing the script now," she writes. "Cancer would decide. And realizing this, he broke down with fear and love and regret. And once again, I was the woman who had chosen him thirty years before and built a life and family with him. We were lovers, life companions, crusaders, side by side, for a vision of what the country could be, and we were an old married couple.”

Does the soaring rhetoric make it sound like she was convincing herself? “I grabbed hold of it,” she writes, the “it” being the story she was telling herself. “I needed to.” I needed to. A confession about a confession, that whatever she just said may not be true except that she needs it to be.

Edwards’ description of the slow collapse of her life speaks to the secret fears of many women: No matter how successful you are, someone with “stars behind his eyes” and “hair like metal in the sun”—to quote a Dorothy Parker poem Edwards herself quotes—can take it away from you. Linda Hirshman writes in Double X [3] on Tuesday about young, liberated women not coming to terms with their sexual vulnerability. But of course that can happen to older women, too. After her husband strayed, she told Oprah, "I'd think, do I look awful at home? Is that it? Am I too strident?"

This is what happens to women, Edwards implies. Her own mother, a woman she assumed was in “total control of her life,” was actually bitter most of her life about an affair her husband had had, Edwards found out one day by reading her diary. Her sister Nancy bought a retirement home for herself and her husband, only to discover that while she was away, he had moved another woman into their real home.

In her television interviews and her book, Edwards tries to erase Rielle Hunter by not mentioning her name. The omission has the opposite effect, of course. It gives Rielle a certain mythical power, an agent of Satan to her Job, maybe. Edwards insisted to Oprah that she was not interested in whether Hunter’s child was her husband’s, that the child’s paternity “is not my life.” But of course, it is her life, or her after-life, because if cancer is writing the script then cancer writes the post-script, too.

If the child is John Edwards’ then she belongs to Elizabeth Edwards’ family, a step-child to her own children. And Rielle is not just a mother but a plausible replacement for her. Edwards does not say this, but she comes close, in a wrenching confession that wipes out all her lies and omissions. Before she ever got sick, she listed for John which of her friends he could marry if she ever suddenly died. “And now I was dying and he had chosen to spend time with someone so completely unlike me.”

Her death, she suddenly realized, will not be simply “a transition for my family but my complete erasure from my family’s life.” How strange, and sad, and extraordinary that she feels that way. Elizabeth Edwards is a rare force of a woman, in her public and private life. In her book, her appearances, she has portrayed herself as the victor over this nothing of a woman. And yet deep in her heart, she is terrified of being erased. And what can she do about that, except rage against the Fates?

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