Small talk: did the homemaker heroine cook her own goose?

Interview, June, 2004 by Camille Paglia

INGRID SISCHY: Camille, can you bake?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: [laughs] I don't bake, no. My specialty is large hunks of highly spiced meat I'm good at making great pots of things like pot roasts and stews--like medieval banquet dishes for Viking warriors--but that's as far as I go. I belong to that '60s generation that revolted against Betty Crocker. To me, Betty Crocker was a vicious oppressor, so baking isn't part of my repertoire. I do admire Martha Stewart, however, for having updated the image of mistress of the household. She had a profound impact on American taste and design from the moment her books appeared in the 1980s. She kind of infiltrated the culture under the radar.

IS: When did you first become aware of Stewart?

CP: I was attending a cousin's wedding in upstate New York in the mid-'80s. It was theatrically staged at a remote country inn, and at the reception there were tables heaped with all sorts of produce--cabbage, chard, rutabagas, and so on. I remember saying, "What are all these groceries doing here?" [Sischy laughs] I had no idea that this was a Martha Stewart concept--natural accents for bucolic country weddings. Her power of imagination and her ability to stimulate imagination in others--not the upper-middleclass elite but the middle and working classes--were extraordinary. These were women who wanted to make their homes and family events occasions for beauty and pleasure. As an Italian-American, I had an immediate vibe with Martha Stewart. Despite her embrace of the tony WASP style and her early erasure of her family's immigrant past, I felt she had a kind of cultivated Mediterranean sensibility that was sorely needed in the U.S.

IS: The whole other argument says women felt inadequate because the image Martha Stewart was projecting was of "the perfect woman"--who has a great job and great family, who is successful at work and yet still gets the perfect light-blue frosting on the cupcake. That made many women who could not get the damned frosting right or who didn't want to bake or cook feel inadequate. To them Stewart was the opposite of empowering: She was taking women backwards.

CP: But it was lower-middle-class women who created the Martha Stewart cult. Martha came to general attention after her 1994 appearance on Oprah, where the audience was jammed with her fans and their baffled husbands and where she inspired a rock-star hysteria. The resentment you're speaking of came from ambitious upper-middle-class women of my generation who had rejected the things that Stewart was espousing and who had pursued careers. For decades after Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, feminism had disparaged and diminished the lives of women who wanted to be "merely" homemakers. Martha Stewart allowed these women to view the creation of an environment as an art form. Later the whole project became maniacal--she got lost in her fictive world like the Wizard of Oz.

IS: Compare Martha Stewart with Julia Child, the popular chef whose style was so loose and empathetic. I always loved how Child dropped a turkey on TV, wiped it off, took a sip of a drink, and just kept going.

CP: Well, Julia Child is Martha Stewart's primary precursor and a monumental figure in American culture. But Child actually came from the classy, privileged background that Martha, the daughter of Polish immigrants, aspired to. It's very ironic that Martha turned into Miss Perfect, a brittle hallucination of what she thought the genteel lifestyle was, when Julia Child has the cordial, relaxed manner of the true elite--those to whom wealth and position came naturally. Child has the hearty, horsy, up-and-at-'em style of the old Seven Sisters colleges. It descends from the British upper class and their country manors, where there would be holes in the leather furniture, and the little old man trotting around with a trowel and dirty gaiters turned out to be the duke. There's a lack of pretension. I think Martha made a pivotal error when she transplanted her primary residence to the Hamptons. That's when she lost her bearings. She had re-created the nature-centered British country house at her Connecticut home on Turkey Hill Farm. But the Hamptons are all about status and wealth. She wanted to be a celebrity player. The Martha of the '90s began to be seen as a snobbish socialite who hobnobbed with Hillary Clinton. But that wasn't the Martha who originally attracted her mass audience---a group that has never lost its loyalty to her.

IS: Many people saw a smugness in Stewart emerging with the legal troubles caused by the sale of her ImClone shares. Before her trial, which wrapped in March, she seemed to project the attitude that she was above the law. Some of those who are still loyal to her feel that she's been given a rough rap, perhaps due to a spirit of antifeminism. In fact, some feminists claim that the case against Stewart is a feminist issue, that if a powerful man had been accused of this relatively minor crime, it never would have received the attention it has.