Elizabeth Edwards’ Passive Aggression

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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 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.