Document Type

Thesis - University Access Only

Award Date

2005

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department / School

English

First Advisor

Michael Keller

Abstract

Perhaps no other contemporary entrepreneur has more successfully created a marketing niche all her own than Martha Stewart. In 1997, Stewart instituted her marketing vision: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO), a multimedia juggernaut devoted to "how-to" content. By the end of 2000, Stewart could boast a successful television career, scores of books bearing her name, a partnership with Kmart to sell her Everyday line of housewares, a syndicated radio show, a column in hundreds of papers nationwide, multiple magazines, a mail order catalogue, and a thriving Internet site. While Stewart's keen business acumen and vision were instrumental in growing MSLO, they do not fully account for her phenomenal success or her longevity in the marketplace. Uncertainty about the future has many people looking back to a past that seems less threatening and more comforting. By arousing a desire for a utopian and pretechnological home, Stewart attempts to reconnect consumers with lost tradition. Though consumers cannot return to this past, they can seek to "recreate" it by purchasing items designed to evoke it. A longing for a pre-industrial past and a shift in production from the home to the factory gave rise to a "cult of domesticity" during the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the wake of a growing market economy, women's roles changed as they became responsible for the morality of their families and for purchasing the domestic goods that industrialization had made possible. Corporate advertisers, women's magazines, and domestic advisors were influential in proliferating women's new, "natural roles" as homemakers and consumers. Similarly, Stewart encourages women to devote their energies to the purchase and arrangement of household goods, thereby limiting their influence to the domestic sphere. Identifying strategies of control inherent in the discursive practices of advertisements, conduct literature, horoscopes, and tabloids can help us to contextualize Stewart's cultural authority and thus analyze the tactics she uses to enforce it so that we might understand how such authority limits, even tyrannizes women, at the same time it promises to empower them.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Stewart, Martha
Nostalgia -- Social aspects
Social control
Popular culture
Sex role
Home economics

Publisher

South Dakota State University

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Rights Statement

In Copyright