Kyla Wazana Tompkins was working in a cookbook store and studying at Toronto’s York University when she first heard the name that inevitably inspires either potshots or paeans: Martha Stewart.
“People would come into the store and talk about her and have the most extreme responses,” Tompkins says. “I wanted to understand that, so I began reading and applying some of the culture theory I had learned as an undergraduate, and it took off from there.”
Among her conclusions: “I think that she just is a puzzle. She’s sort of a very masculine woman doing very feminine things in a male economy, and that’s worrying for people.”
Now, Tompkins, a Stanford doctoral student in modern thought and literature, and Zoë Newman, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, have assembled and edited “No Place Like Home: Making Sense of Martha Stewart.” The 300-plus-page unpublished anthology of essays and illustrations is getting a lot of attention, particularly in the months since Stewart was indicted for securities fraud and obstruction of justice. The work has been featured in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, London’s Times Literary Supplement, Agence France-Presse and AP, and on National Public Radio. “All this for a panel that never happened, and a book that still needs a publisher,” says Tompkins.
It’s true: the Modern Language Association rejected the panel on Stewart that Tompkins and Newman proposed some six years ago. But the pair’s call for papers stayed on the Internet and drew a wide array of responses. The resulting anthology includes the work of architects, essayists, a National Enquirer reporter and a photographer who makes rugs from dryer lint, among others. “They all riff on her concept of domesticity,” says Tompkins. “She hits a cultural nerve with people, and she’s somewhat inscrutable and not easily explained—like a knot you cannot unravel.”
Coming from a family of good cooks, bakers and wine makers, Tompkins seemed destined to write a dissertation that involved food. She’s examining how the concept of domesticity developed in 19th-century America; but the final chapter, perhaps not surprisingly, focuses on Stewart.
After she finishes her degree, however, it might be time to leave the doyenne of domesticity behind. While Tompkins says she “admires” Stewart for the success she’s achieved “on the power of an aesthetic vision,” she’s also feeling the fatigue that comes from observing and analyzing a subject for more than six years: “I’m so sick to death of her.”
