Martha Stewart’s Tripartite Soul

Martha Stewart in Martha (2024) | Dir. R. J. Cutler / Courtesy of Netflix

In the first half of R. J. Cutler’s documentary Martha, released by Netflix in October 2024, we hear the word “perfect” too many times to count. But that’s not so surprising: The documentary’s subject, media mogul Martha Stewart, has a celebrated repertoire of what Plato and his crew called tekne—art in the sense of skill. Stewart is well-known for her arts—in cooking, baking, and decorating, yes, but also in trading stocks. These skills combined become lifestyle, a category Stewart claims she helped invent. She certainly helped perfect it.

But, something struck me as uncanny about Stewart’s perfection: Her private self (housewife) and public self (writing and selling books about being a housewife) are so seamlessly joined that the meaning of either one dissolves. In Plato’s Republic, the collapse of public and private life in the polis includes a systematization of reproduction that is both eugenicist in nature and allows for incest. For the Greeks, the collapse of public and private life never ended well.

“Lifestyle” is the art of living, of concerning ourselves not only with what we eat but how we eat it. Stewart’s line of CBD gummies comes in berry or citrus medleys—in the language of her website, “exciting flavors like Kumquat, Huckleberry, and Pomelo.” In Martha, she shares that the inspiration behind her famous table displays—strawberries spilling out of baskets, rolling hills of crudités—is drawn from the Old Dutch Masters. Here we see Stewart take life itself as her subject, but life, in her own description, comes in air quotes.

The dissonance of a “perfect” union of private and public life would seem to have reached its zenith during Stewart’s tour for her 1987 photobook, Weddings.  Stewart assured readers that there was no typical wedding: “Each one was a wonderful drama in itself, steeped in personality, family history, and a kind of folklore.” But in private, she was writing letters to her soon-to-be ex-husband, as featured in the film: “Dearest Andy, I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. My skin is worried, and many lines that were not there are now there.”       

But the real scandal of a perfectly public domesticity was to come.

Those with even a vague awareness of Stewart might recall that she spent five months in prison in the early aughts. The documentary recounts how Stewart unloaded her shares of ImClone Systems right before the company collapsed—as did the company’s CEO, Samuel Waskal, and a number off his friends and family members. In their paper “The Government Closes in on Ms. Stewart,” Arianne R. Westby, Mary P. Moulton, and James S. O’Rourke observe that the civil and criminal charges faced by Stewart and her broker were “fairly standard” for people accused of both insider trading and covering up, with an exception: that Stewart had defrauded investors in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia when she and her attorneys released statements proclaiming her innocence. “Whether this was a personal or public offense seemed to be the question at the root of the case,” the authors write. They include a quote of Stewart’s for The New Yorker from around the time of her trial: “When asked if she might consider stepping down from her role as chief executive officer in the company she founded, her reply was quick and direct: ‘Quit a business that is my life? Impossible.’” In that case, a public trial over supposedly private matters would seem inevitable. In a post-trial statement that sounds like marketing copy for a Greek tragedy, Stewart, standing on the courthouse steps, declared that “what was a small personal matter became … an almost fatal circus event of unprecedented proportions.” 

Martha is a collaboration with Stewart herself, who not only sat for interviews with Cutler but turned over her entire personal archive to him. The first half of the film covers her life from childhood, from her  time as a model through her career as a stockbroker, through to her marriage and her company’s wildly successful IPO. But almost all of the film’s second half is dedicated to Stewart’s trial and prison time, before ending with her “comeback.” 

Stewart herself didn’t care for the film’s focus. The ordeal was “less than two years out of an 83-year life,” she told the New York Times. “A vacation, to tell you the truth.”  I have a different qualm. The film’s narration of the trial left out the most interesting thing about the whole ordeal: Stewart, who has always maintained her innocence, went ahead and served her sentence, rather than waiting, as she could have done, for the results of her appeal.       

Stewart acted not only as the defendant, but also as her own judge and jury; perhaps, like Socrates in the Apology and Crito, she concluded that doing what most people would do—flee the regime’s ruling—would be bad for the brand. 

In Plato’s Republic, each person’s soul, like a city, has three parts. The appetitive, desiring part of the soul, the epithumêtikon, maps onto those in the city who make money by producing the city’s goods and services. The next part of the soul is the thumoeides, or spirit. This is the part of the soul that acts courageously, capable not only of desiring but of obtaining what it desires. While the thumoeides is represented by the auxiliaries (what we might call the military class), the crowning part of the city-as-soul is its rulership. This is the class of philosopher-judges: the logistikon, the rational part. 

Inside the perfect citadel of taste that is the private-and-public entity known as “Martha Stewart,” we see the ravenous epithumêtikon  pursue perfection, perhaps fame and fortune. Stewart’s thumoeides, her spirit, may be interpreted as her sense of style, including her social manners, humor, and aesthetic preferences. Cutler’s first interview question for Stewart is: “What is it that you most dislike?” It’s a difficult question to answer, she says, but she doesn’t seem to have any problem rattling things off: “I dislike waste. I dislike inefficiency. Avoidance … I dislike aprons and house dresses … red is another thing I’m not very fond of.” 

A driven individual and skilled in the thing she loves doing, Stewart has made public what was private in order to gain both recognition and livelihood. The desirous epithumêtikon might cheat to get ahead, which makes the entire soul look bad, so the rational logistikon must intervene to save appearances. It must pull into line the subordinate epithumêtikon and thumoeides. The desirous Martha Stewart would never want to go to prison. The spirited Martha Stewart does not want to go to prison but is willing to negotiate for the sake of the mission—a better look. 

In doing time served without waiting for the appellate process, Stewart claimed to be seeking “finality,” “closure,” and the swiftest route back to her “good works.” Going further, she has explained, “I would like to be back as early in March as possible to plant a new spring garden.” (Others have suggested that she never stood a chance of winning, anyway.) Stewart, flipping the script of what her innocence might look like, noted the country’s high incarceration rate, saying she would be “joining more than two million other souls who are serving time.” The aftermath of her prison stint was also the beginning of a snappier new brand, characterized by her roast of Justin Beiber and friendship with Snoop Dogg, now just as celebrated as her previous image as Ms. Perfect. 

In the portrait painted in Martha, we see the city-as-soul in action within one woman. She stays home to do the cooking, polishing her arts, and she leaves the home to sell those arts as “lifestyle.” When disaster strikes, Martha Stewart, judge and jury, mediates between these two parts. Hers is an imperfect polis, contradictory and complete, like Stewart herself. She seems to have thought of everything.