How Baby-Boomer Daughters Made Martha Stewart The Queen of Living Well
The Story of How, and Why, Martha Stewart Became the Queen of Living Well
When Margaret Talbot profiled Martha Stewart in 1996, Stewart’s magazine “Living” had only been around for five years, but already boasted 1.5 million subscribers. Stewart had a television show, multiple books on the bestseller list, etc. etc. etc. Talbot noted that Stewart “may or may not be the height of her success,” perhaps underestimating just how much further Martha’s brand could expand and explode. Despite a conviction for insider trading—which may have done in the career of a less tenacious baker of pastries and determiner of trends—Stewart is still the uncontested Queen of Living Well. In her quest to understand how Stewart’s ethos was changing the domestic landscape, Talbot tapped into the undercurrent of unreachability and impossibility that Martha and co. were selling then—and still are.
To mark its 100th anniversary, The New Republic is republishing a collection of its most memorable articles. This week’s theme: Profiles that made us rethink their subjects.
This piece originally appeared in The New Republic on May 13, 1996.
Every age gets the household goddess it deserves. The ’60s had Julia Child, the sophisticated French chef who proved as permissive as Dr. Spock. She may have proselytized for a refined foreign cuisine from her perch at a Boston PBS station, but she was always an anti-snob, vowing to “take a lot of the la dee dah out of French cooking.” With her madras shirts and her penumbra of curls, her 6’2″ frame and her whinny of a voice, she exuded an air of Cambridge eccentricity—faintly bohemian and a little tatty, like a yellowing travel poster. She was messy and forgiving. When Julia dropped an egg or collapsed a souffle, she shrugged and laughed. “You are alone in the kitchen, nobody can see you, and cooking is meant to be fun,” she reminded her viewers. She wielded lethal-looking kitchen knives with campy abandon, dipped her fingers into crème anglaise and wiped her chocolate-smeared hands on an apron tied carelessly at her waist. For Child was also something of a sensualist, a celebrant of appetite as much as a pedant of cooking.
In the ’90s, and probably well into the next century, we have Martha Stewart, corporate overachiever turned domestic superachiever, Mildred Pierce in earth-toned Armani. Martha is the anti-Julia. Consider the extent of their respective powers. At the height of her success, Child could boast a clutch of bestselling cookbooks and a gemütlich TV show shot on a single set. At what may or may not be the height of her success, here’s what Stewart can claim: a five-year-old magazine, Martha Stewart Living, with a circulation that has leapt to 1.5 million; a popular cable TV show, also called “Martha Stewart Living” and filmed at her luscious Connecticut and East Hampton estates; a dozen wildly successful gardening, cooking and lifestyle books; a mail-order business, Martha-by-Mail; a nationally syndicated newspaper column, “Ask Martha”; a regular Wednesday slot on the “Today” show; a line of $110-a-gallon paints in colors inspired by the eggs her Araucana hens lay; plans to invade cyberspace—in short, an empire.
Julia limited herself to cooking lessons, with the quiet implication that cooking was a kind of synecdoche for the rest of bourgeois existence; but Martha’s parish is vaster, her field is all of life. Her expertise, as she recently explained to Mediaweek magazine, covers, quite simply, “Beautiful soups and how to make them, beautiful houses and how to build them, beautiful children and how to raise them.” (From soups to little nuts.) She presides, in fact, over a phenomenon that, in other realms, is quite familiar in American society and culture: a cult, devoted to her name and image.
In the distance between these two cynosures of domestic life lies a question: What does the cult of Martha mean? Or, to put it another way, what have we done, exactly, to deserve her?
If you have read the paper or turned on the television in the last year or so, you have probably caught a glimpse of the WASPy good looks, the affectless demeanor, the nacreous perfection of her world. You may even know the outlines of her story. Middle-class girl from a Polish-American family in Nutley, New Jersey, works her way through Barnard in the early ’60s, modeling on the side. She becomes a stockbroker, a self-described workaholic and insomniac who by the ’70s is making six figures on Wall Street, and who then boldly trades it all in … for life as a workaholic, insomniac evangelist for domesticity whose business now generates some $200 million in profits a year. (She herself, according to the Wall Street Journal, makes a salary of $400,000 a year from Time Inc., which generously supplements this figure with a $40,000 a year clothing allowance and other candies.) You may even have admired her magazine, with its art-book production values and spare design, every kitchen utensil photographed like an Imogen Cunningham nude, every plum or pepper rendered with the loving detail of an eighteenth-century botanical drawing, every page a gentle exhalation of High Class.
What you may not quite realize, if you have not delved deeper into Stewart’s oeuvre, is the ambition of her design for living—the absurd, self-parodic dream of it. To read Martha Stewart is to know that there is no corner of your domestic life that cannot be beautified or improved under careful tutelage, none that should not be colonized by the rhetoric and the discipline of quality control. Work full time though you may, care for your family though you must, convenience should never be your watchword in what Stewart likes to call, in her own twee coinage, “homekeeping.” Convenience is the enemy of excellence. “We do not pretend that these are ‘convenience’ foods,” she writes loftily of the bread and preserves recipes in a 1991 issue of the magazine. “Some take days to make. But they are recipes that will produce the very best results, and we know that is what you want.” Martha is a kitchen-sink idealist. She scorns utility in the name of beauty. But her idealism, of course, extends no further than surface appearances, which makes it a very particular form of idealism indeed.
To spend any length of time in Marthaland is to realize that it is not enough to serve your guests homemade pumpkin soup as a first course. You must present it in hollowed-out, hand-gilded pumpkins as well. It will not do to serve an Easter ham unless you have baked it in a roasting pan lined with, of all things, “tender, young, organically-grown grass that has not yet been cut.” And, when serving a “casual” lobster and corn dinner al fresco, you really ought to fashion dozens of cunning little bamboo brushes tied with raffia and adorned with a chive so that each of your guests may butter their corn with something pretty.
To be a Martha fan (or more precisely, a Martha adept) is to understand that a terracotta pot is just a terracotta pot until you have “aged” it, painstakingly rubbing yogurt into its dampened sides, then smearing it with plant food or “something you found in the woods” and patiently standing by while the mold sprouts. It is to think that maybe you could do this kind of thing, anyway—start a garden, say, in your scruffy backyard—and then to be brought up short by Martha’s enumeration, in Martha Stewart’s Gardening, of forty-nine “essential” gardening tools. These range from a “polesaw” to a “corn fiber broom” to three different kinds of pruning shears, one of which—the “loppers”—Martha says she has in three different sizes. You have, perhaps, a trowel. But then Martha’s garden is a daunting thing to contemplate, what with its topiary mazes and state-of-the-art chicken coop; its “antique” flowers and geometric herb garden. It’s half USDA station, half Sissinghurst. And you cannot imagine making anything remotely like it at your own house, not without legions of artisans and laborers and graduate students in landscape design, and a pot of money that perhaps you’ll unearth when you dig up the yard.
In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch describes the ways in which pleasure, in our age, has taken on “the qualities of work,” allowing our leisuretime activities to be measured by the same standards of accomplishment that rule the workplace. It is a phenomenon that he memorably characterizes as “the invasion of play by the rhetoric of achievement.” For Lasch, writing in the early ’70s, the proliferation of sex-advice manuals offered a particularly poignant example. Today, though, you might just as easily point to the hundreds of products and texts, from unctuous homefurnishings catalogs to upscale “shelter” magazines to self-help books like Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, that tell us exactly how to “nest” and “cocoon” and “nurture,” how to “center” and “retreat,” and how to measure our success at these eminently private pursuits. Just as late-nineteenth-century marketers and experts promised to bring Americans back in touch with the nature from which modern industrial life had alienated them, so today’s “shelter” experts—the word is revealingly primal—promise to reconnect us with a similarly mystified home. The bourgeois home as lost paradise, retrievable through careful instruction.
Martha Stewart is the apotheosis of this particular cult of expertise, and its most resourceful entrepreneur. She imagines projects of which we would never have thought—gathering dewy grass for our Easter ham, say—and makes us feel the pressing need for training in them. And she exploits, brilliantly, a certain estrangement from home that many working women feel these days. For women who are working longer and longer hours at more and more demanding jobs, it’s easy to think of home as the place where chaos reigns and their own competence is called into doubt; easy to regard the office, by comparison, as the bulwark of order. It is a reversal, of course, of the hoary concept of home as a refuge from the tempests of the marketplace. But these days, as the female executives in a recent study attested, the priority they most often let slide is housekeeping; they’ll abide disorder at home that they wouldn’t or couldn’t abide at the office. No working couple’s home is the oasis of tranquility and Italian marble countertops that Marthaism seems to promise. But could it be? Should it be? Stewart plucks expertly at that chord of doubt.
In an era when it is not at all uncommon to be cut off from the traditional sources of motherwit and household lore—when many of us live far from the families into which we were born and have started our own families too late to benefit from the guidance of living parents or grandparents—domestic pedants like Martha Stewart rightly sense a big vacuum to fill. Stewart’s books are saturated with nostalgia for lost tradition and old moldings, for her childhood in Nutley and for her mother’s homemade preserves. In the magazine, her “Remembering” column pines moralistically for a simpler era, when beach vacations meant no television or video games, just digging for clams and napping in hammocks. Yet Stewart’s message is that such simplicity can only be achieved now through strenuous effort and a flood of advice. We might be able to put on a picnic or a dinner party without her help, she seems to tell us, but we wouldn’t do it properly, beautifully, in the spirit of excellence that we expect of ourselves at work.
It may be that Stewart’s special appeal is to women who wouldn’t want to take their mother’s word anyway, to baby-boomer daughters who figure that their sensibilities are just too different from their stay-at-home moms’, who can’t throw themselves into housekeeping without thinking of their kitchen as a catering business and their backyards as a garden show. In fact, relatively few of Martha’s fans are housewives—72 percent of the subscribers to Martha Stewart Living are employed outside the home as managers or professionals—and many of them profess to admire her precisely because she isn’t one, either. As one such Martha acolyte, an account executive at a Christian radio station, effused on the Internet: “[Stewart] is my favorite independent woman and what an entrepreneur! She’s got her own television show, magazine, books and even her own brand of latex paint….Martha is a feisty woman who settles for nothing less than perfection.”
For women such as these, the didactic faux-maternalism of Martha Stewart seems the perfect answer. She may dispense the kind of homekeeping advice that a mother would, but she does so in tones too chill and exacting to sound “maternal,” singling out, for example, those “who will always be too lazy” to do her projects. She makes housekeeping safe for the professional woman by professionalizing housekeeping. And you never forget that Stewart is herself a mogul, even when she’s baking rhubarb crisp and telling you, in her Shakeresque mantra, that “It’s a Good Thing.”
It is tempting to see the Martha cult purely as a symptom of anti-feminist backlash. Though she may not directly admonish women to abandon careers for hearth and home, Stewart certainly exalts a way of life that puts hearth and home at its center, one that would be virtually impossible to achieve without somebody’s full-time devotion. (Camille Paglia has praised her as “someone who has done a tremendous service for ordinary women—women who identify with the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker.”) Besides, in those alarming moments when Stewart slips into the social critic’s mode, she can sound a wee bit like Phyllis Schlafly—less punitive and more patrician, maybe, but just as smug about the moral uplift of a well-ordered home. Her philosophy of cultivating your own walled garden while the world outside is condemned to squalor bears the hallmarks of Reagan’s America—it would not be overreading to call it a variety of conservatism. “Amid the horrors of genocidal war in Bosnia and Rwanda, the AIDS epidemic and increasing crime in many cities,” Stewart writes in a recent column, “there are those of us who desire positive reinforcement of some very basic tenets of good living.” And those would be? “Good food, gardening, crafts, entertaining and home improvement.” (Hollow out the pumpkins, they’re starving in Rwanda.)
Yet it would, in the end, be too simplistic to regard her as a tool of the feminine mystique, or as some sort of spokesmodel for full-time mommies. For one thing, there is nothing especially June Cleaverish, or even motherly, about Stewart. She has taken a drubbing, in fact, for looking more convincing as a businesswoman than a dispenser of milk and cookies. (Remember the apocryphal tale that had Martha flattening a crate of baby chicks while backing out of a driveway in her Mercedes?) Her habitual prickliness and Scotchguard perfectionism are more like the badges of the striving good girl, still cut to the quick by her classmates’ razzing when she asked for extra homework.
Despite the ritual obeisance that Martha pays to Family, moreover, she is not remotely interested in the messy contingencies of family life. In the enchanted world of Turkey Hill, there are no husbands (Stewart was divorced from hers in 1990), only loyal craftsmen, who clip hedges and force dogwood with self-effacing dedication. Children she makes use of as accessories, much like Parisian women deploy little dogs. The books and especially the magazine are often graced with photographic spreads of parties and teas where children pale as waxen angels somberly disport themselves, their fair hair shaped into tasteful blunt cuts, their slight figures clad in storybook velvet or lace. “If I had to choose one essential element for the success of an Easter brunch,” she writes rather menacingly in her 1994 Menus for Entertaining, “it would be children.” The homemade Halloween costumes modeled by wee lads and lasses in an October 1991 issue of Martha Stewart Living do look gorgeous—the Caravaggio colors, the themes drawn from nature. But it’s kind of hard to imagine a five-year-old boy happily agreeing to go as an acorn this year, instead of say, Batman. And why should he? In Marthaland, his boyhood would almost certainly be overridden in the name of taste.
Click here to view original web page at www.newrepublic.com
Category: Anniversary, Articles
