You know someone is truly an icon when she can go solely on her first
name. Beyonce, Gisele, Marilyn. Such is also the case with both Julia
(Child) and Martha (Stewart) -- two dominant, headstrong women who took
the reins and used food and cooking to become TV superstars.
I hate to gender stereotype, but it is hard to argue with the fact that
there still exist typically male and typically female character
traits... at least in our perception. Despite androgynous vampires and
Chaz Bono going on
Dancing with the Stars, our societal norms are still situated in women as the 'softer' sex and men as the assertive hunters.
Both Julia and Martha possess decidedly masculine characteristics. Both
are competitive, insistent, confident to the point of arrogance, and
unafraid to give their opinions even when wildly unpopular. Yet, we
remember Julia with fondness while Martha is prickly and rubs us the
wrong way. And Julia was able to transcend herself to become 'the queen
of cuisine' while Martha is forever mired in the quagmire of her own
'Martha-ness'... as 'Cruella de-Stewart' for example.
So what is the difference between these powerful women? Martha may have
2.3 million Twitter followers, but Julia has the entire country
affectionately recalling her high-pitched voice and her awkward height
and posture. And perhaps that is at the heart of it. Julia was capable
of -- even embraced -- being imperfect, while Martha incessantly
reiterates an image of the unattainable. Yes, you can try to be like
Martha or create the 'perfect' Thanksgiving that she displays in her
magazine spreads and on her show, but you can never achieve exactly what
Martha does. No one is ever as good as Martha. Julia, on the other
hand, was happy to let you see her drop a turkey on the floor and put it
back on the plate to serve.
First, let's look at Julia. Julia is the queen of haute cuisine. Her
Mastering the Art of French Cooking is frequently referred to as a 'Bible.' She has been parodied on
Saturday Night Live by Dan Aykroyd, has appeared in a Nike Commercial, has been the subject of numerous comic strips (
The New Yorker, Beetle Bailey, for example), and has been an answer in a
New York Times
crossword puzzle. She has been on Sesame Street and in a Boston Science
Museum exhibit captivating children with an explanation of how DNA and
the beginnings of life emerged from a 'primordial soup.' She has
appeared in
Life magazine, has been on the cover of
Time,
and has been described as more convincing than Walter Cronkite. She has
transcended the realm of cooking to take her place alongside the Statue
of Liberty and Florence Nightingale as bearer and protector of national
values and culture, as author of history still not yet written.
Ironically, Julia's fundamental 'American-ness' is paradoxically built
around the emblematic figure of 'The French Chef.' I wrote an article as
a graduate student at UC-Santa Barbara considering how this capture and
redefinition of what is so essential to France (their particular
cuisine and relationship to food) reveals how the project of national
identity is situated always, as Stuart Hall explains, in "the gaze of
Otherness. And there is no identity that is without the dialogic
relationship to the Other. The Other is outside, but also inside the
Self, the identity. So identity is a process, identity is split.
Identity is not a fixed point but an ambivalent point."
(Stuart Hall, "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference," in Geoff Eley & Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Becoming National (1996), p. 345)
In other words, this 'ambivalent point' of American identity
corresponds to a congruent node of ambivalence in French identity -- the
resounding chorus is that of two nations involved in a discourse
wherein the definition of self circles around the negation and yet the
very present-ness of the other. Through the mercurial relationship that
exists (and has historically existed) between the United States and
France, each nation has developed a critical 'anti-legend.' America is
that which is not French and France is most definitely that which is
not America -- each anti-legend buoyed most notably by
its unifying force and its allegorical capacities -- since
by talking about America it [France] never stopped talking about France.
With, however, one considerable difference: the metadiscourses of
legitimization are organized around purely positive nodes --
emancipating the citizen, fulfilling the spirit, a classless society,
and so on. The "great legends" are dead, outdated by postmodernity's
inherent "incredulouness." As for anti-Americanism, it has spread and
prospered: a convex "great legend," it remains operational while the
metadiscouses of good have lost all their effectiveness, all their
powers of coalescence in the social imagination. Which is all the more
reason for taking it seriously: this anti-legend... (Phillipe Roger, The American Enemy: A Story of French Anti-Americanism (2005), pg. 453)
With
the death of the 'great legends,' the grand narratives, the
'metadiscourses of good,' the importance of the other in its role as
non-self is heightened. In other words, the ambivalence of the self, the
very un-fixedness of identity, leaves a gap in our desire for communal
mythologizing. Thus, the legend re-emerges at the anti-legend rather
than disappearing altogether. Julia Child serves this purpose of
re-mythologizing characteristic aspects of American identity -- as
self-made, as practical, as down-to-earth and self-effacing. In doing
so, she re-situated "the whole topos of egalitarian innocence and happy
frugality"
(Roger, p.41) around
the central characteristic of French cuisine. In Julia Child, a
six-foot-two, gangly and slightly awkward woman was "'our lady of the
ladle,' gazing benevolently from the cover of
Time at her vast
American following. She [would become] a reassuring and familiar icon, a
national treasure, cherished for her pervasive presence on television."
(Noel Riley Fitch, Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (1997), p. 310)
In re-locating the very heart and soul of French culture into this
woman, the iconization of Julia Child represents not only the assertion
of a national myth, but the consumption of the 'other's' very essence
into the self.
In the necessarily ongoing construction of American national identity,
Julia Child exemplifies the inability of the nation to exist solely as a
place. Instead, it hovers in the ghostly forces, the image-making
icons, produced and consumed in the public sphere that defines its
future power and past significance through this "sliding movement or
flickering between the two,"
(Pheah Cheng, "Spectral Nationality," Boundary 2 26:3 (1999), p. 247)
between the self and the other. Ultimately, the nation takes on a
bodily manifestation in order for its legends or anti-legends to take
shape (think of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Jesse James, Paul Revere,
Hiawatha), yet the irony that critical and postcolonial theorist Pheng
Cheah suggests is that this body is not the origin of a national
spectrality (or intangible) but the recipient, and thus an artificial
and 'artifactual' body -- a tool crafted by the national self to capture
and encapsulate the abstract national spirit.
I explained, in that same paper, how there is a long tradition between
the U.S. and France of antagonistic relations (and cultural
self-perceptions) that, ironically, help define each country's national
self. The USA's emergence from various European colonial rulers meant
that it was colored by this past as a possession of Europe and the Old
World. Even before the American Revolution was complete, the threat this
new nation and culture posed to the 'Old' was sensed. Thereby, a
Franco-American debate evolved which, for the French, was "a crusade
against the budding imposture of America worship -- part scientific
debate, part image war."
(Roger, p. 2)
With no nation having yet achieved independence from colonial rule, the
idea of a democratic nation emerging from this project was both
exciting and threatening. There was a sense in the 1760's and 70's that
if the American colonies won their independence "the result would be a
crop of small-scale, localized tyrants, and that in the long run a kind
of 'rogue state' would emerge, using all kinds of military tactics to
take over global trade."
(Roger, p. 24) The
American nation would have come from something essentially European (as
its leaders and founders were European) and thus the threat -- it was
an affront to the Old World, dominated at the time by France. The stakes
of this dispute were high -- from its ambiguous and interrelated
origins, the American nation had gone from a part of Europe into
something that rejected it and all its culture, morals, values, even its
history. From the beginning, the anti-American attitude assumed by the
French was "not solipsistic, but it [was] largely self-referential and
autarchic."
(Roger, p. xi) The
French had to stem the tides of their own America worship. Their initial
enthusiasm for using the American republic as a model for their own was
quickly realized to be an admission of an intellectual and political
inferiority.
The perception of this threat led to a concerted effort to discredit the
Americas -- and to do so scientifically for science and rational logic
are "proof", of course, and exist as the very backbone of the
Enlightenment. Phillipe Roger, in his book
The American Enemy,
traces these early anti-American sentiments. The proclamation of French
naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, that the New World
produced degenerative cousins of 'authentic' European animals
legitimized the inferiority of America through science. With the machine
set in motion by Buffon, other 'scientific' evidence of America's
shortcomings quickly followed.
Many of the deficiencies of the New World began to bear the mark of
inferior gustatory qualities. Cornelius De Pauw claimed that "plant life
in America was not so much plant
life as plant preserves, a gigantic heap of sauerkraut"
(Roger, p. 17)
(bearing an obvious denigrating reference to the second-rate cuisine of
the nearby incipient German nation.) The main food sources of the
Americas -- yuccas and other roots -- derivatives of the species Jucas
and Manihot were discovered to be poisonous when eaten raw. The
implication was striking: "America was stupefying -- it pretended to
nourish its offspring in order to kill them!"
(Roger, p. 18) With extreme accounts of French colonists forced to turn to cannibalism during their exploration of America, De Pauw
proved this was a wretched, desolate country where no one
could survive, and he hinted at the terrible "revolution" that America
provoked in its invaders, who were transformed into cannibals as surely
as Circe's visitors had been turned into swine... [This pronouncement]
could also be read as an allegory of the fate of colonizing countries:
Europeans devouring each other symbolized the draining of their vital
energy into the human abyss known as America. (Roger, p. 16)
Soon,
this 'science' of inferiority expanded beyond that realm to manifest as
proof for why America had produced no men of genius for, as Guillaume
Thomas Raynal, the French historian and philosopher concluded, "under
this foreign sky, the mind has become as enervated as the body."
(Guillaume Thomas Raynal, quoted in Roger, p. 23)
Notice the bodily reference. And such began the transfer of
pseudo-scientific arguments into the realm of philosophy, morality, and
culture, i.e. "an
aesthetic anti-Americanism, which would be the primitive base of the
cultural anti-Americanism of the twentieth century."
(Roger, p. 36)
French exiles to America began to describe the nation as all that was
anathema to European gentile culture. The Americans were badly mannered,
greedy, conversationally inept, and intellectually lacking. These
American philistines were only interested in material progress in which,
it was conceded, they were rapidly making great economic strides.
However, this interest in the utilitarian 'arts' was perceived as
detrimental to the development of the 'true' arts. France thus reversed
its former idolatry of the "solemn myth... of Washington's America as
neo-Roman, agrarian, and virtuous"
(Roger, p. 40)
and replaced it with a vision of the journey into the American
wilderness as neither "a source of replenishment or a rediscovery of
humanity's robust childhood... [but] a Conradesque trip into the heart
of darkness: one had 'the impression of traveling backward through the
progress of the human spirit.'"
(Roger, p. 42)
It had been the Europeans who had originally 'discovered' America.
These scientific studies, and the basis for a burgeoning cultural
superiority that they established, enabled French intellectuals to
'rediscover' America through their pens. Through the re-writing of the
American narrative as complete degeneration, they once again gave shape
to the New World -- a shape informed by the power of knowledge and
superior cultural authority. Such were the image wars that began as the
United States was just being formed: "just as the New England colonies
were solidifying their aspirations for a
vita nuova, the most listened-to voices in Europe were consigning America to sterility and death."
(Roger, p. 7)
Cuisine is a subject fraught with nuances. It can divide the nation from
the inside (think of all the regional varieties of Indian or Italian
cooking), yet it can define a national character through a more tenuous
putative community. Through its ability to unite people in an 'imagined
community' (Anderson, 1983), it aids the nation-state in the smooth
administration of governance as "gourmandism is one of the principle
bonds in society; it is what gradually expands that spirit of
conviviality uniting the various social strata every day, what forms
them into a single whole, animates conversation, and smoothes the rough
edges of conventional inequality."
(Brillat-Savarin, quoted in Jean-Robert Pitte, French Gastonomy (1991), p. 140)
Whereas the African land grab was an imperial fight over physical
territory, the rivalry between the United States and France is a
struggle over the territory of Culture with a capital C, between the Old
World and the New, indeed between the 'cooked' and the 'raw.' Both
nations are products of the Enlightenment with its legacy of
universalistic totality and its desire to accelerate human 'progress' in
which "the linked and complementary goals of universal enlightenment
and universal commerce contained no space of opacity."
(Paul Rabinow, French Modern (1989), p. 23)
France had long assumed control over the spread of Culture -- in
fashion, furniture, art, and food. The metamorphosis of Julia Child into
a national icon who practically single handedly created a unique
American cuisine was a usurping of the right to this position of
authorhood in regards to prescribing the realm of the avant-garde and
aesthetics internationally, indeed of the right to be the writer of
'history [or History] even before it was written.'
Long before Martha became the measure of the success of our holiday
cooking and interior decorating, Julia invaded the home through the
medium of television. Home is largely about nostalgia rather than
reality... and is most certainly based in memory. The visual mediums of
television and film can thereby serve as ways to recover "'lost, unheard
memories'... of that past. So identity, it seems is a question of
memory, and memories of 'home' in particular."
(David Morley & Kevin Robins, "No Place like Heimat: Images of Home(land) in European Culture," in Eley & Suny, p. 461)
For many viewers, Julia excavated an American historical cuisine
(germinating from the French) dug out of (or into) the metaphorical
archaeology of the American home -- in fact, right in its very heart,
the kitchen. Her spectrality of the intangible other was thus
reconstructed into an exclusively
American memory -- a memory
located in a place (unlike the placeless nation) and in a space
(American public television and its public sphere.)
Raymond Oliver, a television chef in France and the author of Gastronomy
of France, would devote an entire chapter of his book to one of the
nation's most hallowed and mystical dishes --
bouillabaisse. The
great fish soup stood for "the most vibrant and passionate [traits]... a
dish which in itself represents a whole region and its deepest
motivations and symbols."
(Raymond Oliver, The Gastronomy of France (1967), p. 163) Julia spent a long time on a mission to understand this
vraie
bouillabaisse. Finally, after receiving "conflicting advice as to the
true ingredients: one said absolutely no tomatoes, one said saffron,
another no saffron... [she] became 'irked' at their [French chefs']
dogmatism and occasional ignorance. 'Balls,' she replied in private."
(Fitch, p. 213) The particularities of bouillabaisse -- particularities that, in reality, did not seem to be discernible --
never struck her as sacrosanct. Julia refused to honor that
brand of wisdom about bouillabaisse that insisted only traditional,
grizzled fishermen knew how to make it properly... She went on to make
bouillabaisse everywhere she lived, including Norway, and found she
could always achieve "the necessary flavor." What made a dish French
wasn't the raw materials, it was what happened to them in the hands of
the cook." (Laura Shapiro, "Sacred Cows and Dreamberries: In Search of the Flavor of France," Gastronomica Summer 2005 5-3, p. 57)
In
her French Chef show on bouillabaisse, Julia only calls the soup by its
French name at the beginning of the show. Thereafter, she refers to it
simply as 'fish soup' explaining how "all it is really is a plain
fisherman's stew made out of the day's catch of unsaleable leftovers.
Unfortunately, when you get a famous recipe like this one, the gourmets
get hold of it and they fancy it up so much and say 'do this' or 'do
that' or 'that's not the real thing' that us ordinary people feel it's
impossible to do... but everyone enjoys eating it and there's nothing
very difficult about it."
(The French Chef, "Bouillabaisse a la Marsaillaise, WGBH (Boston), PBS, 1963)
French cooking was not eluding Americans because of any mystical
quality, but because of a snobbish elitism, Julia concluded. "The idea
was to take the bugaboo out of French cooking,"
(Julia Child, quoted in Fitch, p. 289) Julia would remark of her purpose in authoring
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
This 'bugaboo' is exactly what Martha reintroduced into cooking and
decorating and even crafting. Achieving decorated Easter eggs of this
quality is not simple.
For Julia, the French nation was not hallowed. To her it
was a body of knowledge that could be deconstructed and analyzed just
like any other large source of information. Thus, Julia took a
scientific approach to French cuisine (perhaps an ironic counterpoint to
the pseudo-science with which the French once approached the young
American nation), an approach aimed at stripping away its esoteric
quality... for Julia understood that magic was not in any way related to
good cooking. She rigorously tested methods, broke down techniques, and
analyzed obscurely written recipes in a process of codifying French
cuisine into something objective and attainable. This was Julia Child's
earnest pledge: she would "laboriously define the cuisine she had fallen
in love with, breaking it down into its smallest components and putting
them back together so that for the first time they would make sense to
people like herself -- ambitious home cooks from a country French
gastronomes viewed with horror and derision."
(Shapiro, Gastronomica, p. 54)
In the process, Julia discovered that the failure of Americans to be
able to successfully reproduce French dishes was not due to their
incompetence, but to differences in ingredients that had never before
been revealed. Like a true scientist, Julia discovered there was a
gluten difference of 2.5 percent between French and US flours. This
difference had been hampering American bakers in their attempts to
produce a quality loaf of French bread. And this was certainly not the
only difference that had become a cooking problem which had "delayed
completion [of a dish]... from the oversized turkeys that had be cooked
differently from the French poultry to the difficulty of finding creme
fraiche... American veal was not as pale and tender as the French; U.S.
butchers offered different meat cuts; except for parsley, few fresh
herbs were available; American ate a lot of broccoli, which was rare in
France -- and so the discoveries went."
(Fitch, p. 240)
French cuisine became Americanized through Julia. It was analyzed and
rewritten. The title of her magnum opus is instructive. It is
Mastering the Art of French Cooking -- it is mastering, not imitating or admiring, that is meant to transpire. Further, the word
cuisine has become
cooking --
a word which does not sustain the same mystique, the same myth of a
people. In addition, Julia was willing to use modern innovations and
appliances as long as they achieved the same results as traditional
techniques. Martha, on the other hand, prohibited reference to
microwaves until after her release from prison when she was forced to
appease a public who had lost faith in her... and on a more personal
level, in order to rehabilitate her own image as someone accessible to
the everyman.
Julia had the definite purpose of taking 'the bugaboo' out of French
cooking and demonstrating that all one needed to do to cook well -- even
to achieve the most challenging level of haute cuisine -- was to follow
rules. Thereby, she translated French magic into American rationalism.
This rational approach to French cuisine was completely new.
Mastering set
a standard that ensuing cookbooks would follow. None had been so
clearly laid out, exemplified by the two-column approach used in
Mastering where
the ingredients were listed in bold on the left-hand side of the page
and the recipes stood to the right. When Julia appeared on television in
1962, this rational approach continued to be her modus operandi,
countered, of course, by her 'hamming it up.' Julia's enthusiastic way
of analyzing, translating, and teaching was fundamentally appealing to
an American public who had been condescended to by others claiming the
impossible techniques of French cuisine or assuming that Americans would
be challenged by and satisfied with the recipes in
The Can-Opener Cookbook
(1952). At MIT, there was a group of physicists and engineers who
gathered weekly to watch her show. Though their interest was not in
cooking per se, they were enthralled by "her technique, her attention to
detail and rules. Here was a woman on television who was not sexy and
was not selling something; she was demonstrating technique, and they
were fascinated."
(Fitch, p. 309)
Martha began her career as a model. And this interest in appearances has
never stopped. More recently, Martha has allowed a larger staff to
prepare and test recipes for her magazines and cookbooks (still often
without acknowledgement though...) However, when Martha first began
publishing cookbooks on her own, they yielded astonishingly beautiful
end results, but failed frequently in flavor and taste. I know this
because I became a Martha fan early on, but after my mom and I tried
several of her recipes, we concluded the aesthetics didn't make up for
the cardboard taste.
 |
| Martha in Bazaar magazine |
Martha's 'empire' is largely based on show. She is notoriously
well-known for being incredibly picky about presentation. One
particularly out-of-control Thanksgiving shoot is described in the
August 8-15 edition of
New York Magazine in an article by Benjamin Wallace titled "The Comeback That Wasn't":
A Thanksgiving story shot at Stewart's stables in Bedford
featured a long table and was so complicated that it became almost a
comedy of errors. A child's hair caught fire. Stewart sliced her thumb
and was sent to the hospital. At the table, Stewart was flanked by
Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, and his wife, hardly avatars of
the simple life. (By the time the story was published, Marshall was on
trial for misappropriating his mother's fortune, and the picture had to
be blurred out.) "There was an incredible divide between what Martha was
interested in and what the reader wanted," a then-editor says. (Wallace, p. 41)
This is exactly the opposite of Julia. Julia
wanted the
viewer/reader to be successful. Martha wants to remain above us, always
superior, always in utmost control. She screwed one of her most
lucrative deals with Kmart because she demanded renewal of a completely
imbalanced contract. Before ending that partnership, she angrily
expressed in a CNBC interview how disappointed she was with Kmart's
"shabby stores and poor quality merchandise."
(Mercedes Cardona, "Martha Stewart and Kmart: Putting on Appearances")
She bungled other potential deals to diversify the brand away from her
with companies like the Knot, Cynthia Rowley, and Jonathan Adler because
"Stewart would find something wrong with [all the deals.] In some
cases, she'd nix the idea at the last minute, after sitting down with
the prospective brand owner. As one former executive put it, 'She didn't
want anyone else in the kitchen.'"
(Wallace, p. 40) Julia
invites us into her kitchen. Martha makes her kitchen a pinnacle of
unattainable perfection with her always standing in judgment, always in
control. Julia trusted us; Martha trusts no one. Julia cooked and wrote
books and went on television not to promote herself or to create a
brand, but because she wanted to share knowledge with the American
public. She wanted us to enjoy eating, to broaden our gustatory
boundaries. She wanted us to experience the power of making a dish that
seemed impossible. Martha is all about "Martha". Just look at the
following comparison of one of Julia's and one of Martha's book covers.
Visually, Martha dominates her book cover while there is only a
small photo of Julia in the upper right hand corner of her cover. In
terms of the titles themselves, Martha's book is more adamantly
"Martha"-focused. It is
Martha Stewart's Cooking School... and no one else's!! Julia's book is more inviting. You can open it and cook
with Julia.
She is not standing above you in judgment, but in the kitchen by your
side... as a friend with clear, logical instructions.
Julia had a risque and racy sense of humor. She mocked an assistant producer on
Good Morning America
for his failed pronunciation of croque-monsieur: "in her loudest voice,
she said, 'No it's not cock-monsieur, it's croque-monsieur!'"
(Jacques Pepin, "My Friend Julia Child," Gastronomica, p. 13) She swore often and could be heard nonstop making comments such as "Jacques, I have a nice piece of tail for you,"
(Pepin, p. 12)
when Pepin and Julia were showing how to remove lobster meat in one of
their shows. She was unafraid to be herself, even when that self was
entirely imperfect, full of foibles, and inelegance. But that was what
made her endearing. Martha is not endearing. Martha will never reveal to
us who she really is... and it is questionable if she even knows any
more having wrapped her brand and herself so tightly together. In the
end, Julia trusted and invited us to share with her; Martha refused to
trust, refuses to give up power, and thus will never reach the legendary
status of Julia. Perhaps both Julia and Martha exhibit and embody a
particular side of our national identity. As Sarah Radcliffe writes in
her article "Embodying National Identities," (Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, 1999, p. 214): "National
representations are performed through public spectacle, each nation
having its own genealogy of performance." Ultimately, it is the flawed
nature, the unaffected presentation, and childlike infectiousness of
Julia's performance that transcends and spellbinds. Martha is powerful,
but is this enough? Do we really want to buy into a national icon that
pole dances for attention? Perhaps more importantly, all in all, I don't
know if I've ever seen Martha smile... genuinely.
