The week before Christmas, I was shopping for presents in a local bookstore when I heard, behind a bank of books, the rapid, rising whisper of an unmistakably angry woman. I guessed she had just been fired or dumped. It surprised me when I turned the corner and saw a college-age woman, beet-red, hissing at a girlfriend and gesticulating at Martha Stewart’s Handmade Christmas. “I hate her,” the woman was saying, “with her eggshell paint and her — I was so glad when they came out with that parody. Did you see that? Where she stencils her driveway? Ugh.
Someone ought to do Martha Stewart Dying!”
Am I the only person in North America who likes Martha Stewart? Obviously not, since Martha Stewart Living magazine has 1.3 million subscribers, and her syndicated TV show 5 million viewers. But what is it about Martha Stewart that moves our cultural guardians (journalists, book- buyers, etc.) to such paroxysms of loathing? “Martha Stewart Living is a form of tyranny,” writes Antonia Zerbisias of the Toronto Star People lacerated Stewart in a cover profile last October. The Washington Post’s Megan Rosenfeld has defined the “Martha Stewart Moment” as “the time at which you have to be strapped down to keep from taking a shotgun and blasting the television set and her smug little smile to smithereens.”
The rap on Stewart and other high priestesses of domesticity is that they sec retly prey on class anxieties and snobbery. Yet Stewa rt is less a latter-day Emily Post than an upmarket Heloise; there is no etiquette pedantry — none — in any of her books or shows. Stewart doesn’t really care about class, which infuriates our cultural commentators, because it’s the thing they care about most. It is a measure of their confusion that they can never decide whether to tar her as an old- money snob or an $ Iarriviste.
No: What really bothers Stewart’s detractors is that she cares about the home. “I really loved it,” Stewart said of her move to Connecticut in 1974. “I loved the garden. I loved decorating, designing, cooking.” In the wake of feminism’s triumph, this is a subversive message. The staple of the Martha Stewart profile, then, has been to show that she can’t mean it; or if she means it, that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
This accounts for a great deal of the ruthlessness: Writers set out to prove she’s miserable. Last month, even the National Enquirer attacked her for her messy divorce. All Stewart profiles feature the writer’s “surprise” at her occasional iciness and even ruthlessness, as if a love of the kitchen should make one docile as a dumpling. Speaking to Charlie Rose last September, she described her life as a stockbroker in the early seventies. “The movie Wall Street had nothing on this firm,” she says, not without pride. Stewart freely admits she can be a bitch on wheels; to prove that is to prove nothing. In fact, the feminists Stewart by implication spurns are forgetting one of their only sensible insights: that just because home-making is underappreciated doesn’t make it easy or without anguish.
Stewart describes herself as “a balanced feminist” — an exquisite dig — but that doesn’t mean that her life is one of round-the-clock glee. Homemaking, like the arts, has always valued work and beauty at least partly as a refuge from sadness. That’s why every attack on Stewart for having an inner life more tortured than she lets on only makes me think the more highly of her.
Our generation has withdrawn its approval from the housewife’s calling — which is why people make demands of Martha Stewart that they would never make of other artists. Why is it okay for Norman Mailer to stab his wife but not for Martha Stewart to hog the camera? We still read Rimbaud’s poems even though he traded slaves, but we’re supposed to despise Martha’s stollen recipe, or her zabaglione, because she’s Machiavellian in the boardroom?
The anti-Stewart mania, of course, is not about her but about her readers, whether home-makers or not. Stewart critics cast them as a herd of tractable bovines. (“Martha would have us slaving all day to make individual pumpkin souffles in mini jack-o-lanterns,” says Zerbisias.)
Readers of Martha Stewart Living don’t respond to advice with such servility, any more than readers of Anna Karenina all jump under trains. At some level the “housewives” have decided that if the choice is between Martha and her critics, they’ll choose the one who condescends to them less.
I, at least, was thinking along these lines when I quietly said, “Excuse me,” and reached past the irate Martha-hater for my copy of Martha Stewart’s Handmade Christmas. I took it to the counter and asked them to gift-wrap it.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
