Martha Stewart's Living Landscapes

Abstract

If you happen to be livin ' la vida Martha, your passion for good living cannot be confined just to the house.You must also refine your private groundsthe flower garden, the kitchen garden, the lawn, the entire homelot.This is the imperative of Stewartism-improvement through the tradition of gentilitythat domestic advisor Martha Stewart prescribes and performs.Judging by the impressive visibility Stewart has achieved in the popular media, the cultural practices historically known as gentility persist in the late-twentieth centuryand, into the twenty-first.This paper analyzes the landscaped, cultivated world of Martha Stewart as a subject of garden history and the material culture studies of consumerismthe demand for things.Examining Martha Stewart against a backdrop of the historical record and the consumer revolution demonstrates her tendencies of appropriation.Tracing Martha along the contours of prescriptive gardening, domestic literature (see Sarah Leavitt's essay in this roundtable), and the way her garden grows provides a suggestive account of her campaign and goals for the latest mode in commodification-both things and self for sale.In addition, this essay is motivated by a concern for the spatial dimensions, in this case the homelot, of Stewartism as a cultural production.Flowers, seeds, lawns, shrubs, and tools, among other objects, signify meaning in Martha's world and the contemporary moment.Material culture studies demand archaeological thinking: following form through time and space.Such a methodology guides this essay about Martha.

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