American life depends on every one of us doing his or her duty. Just as a butterfly, lazily flapping its gossamer wings in faraway Japan, can inaugurate a tiny zephyr that will one day become a mighty typhoon, so every credit-card holder in these United States, by splurging that bit extra at the store, can strike the keynote of a vast, soon-to-be, consumer-led recovery (which will in time teach every butterfly in Japan who is boss in the world market).

American babies know this as they learn to recognize Gerber products with a toothless beam of contentment. American rug rats and yard apes elaborate on the same essential knowledge as they reach hungrily for the brass ring of aerated shoes and simulated-reality helmets (many of them, alas, manufactured by M. and Mme. Butterfly in faraway Japan). The heroic consumer is our last uncomplicated, authentic American hero. Who was so base as not to experience a surging thrill of pride last Christmas as Yuletide cash registers pinged and beeped a collective "Yes, yes" to the optimism and brio of a dauntless Clinton transition team?

Confidence. That's the ticket. Always has been. Get out there and spend.

But do we ever stop to think of our role models?

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As we strip the mall and patrol the shelves, do we honor the pioneers? What of those whose waking and sleeping lives are sacrificed that we may learn to live and consume, and cram the landfills and dumps in order to consume again? Where is their temple, their shrine? How can we hallow those who went before, and who bear the torch still? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Martha Stewart.

Martha Stewart is a force of nature before which a million flailing fritillaries are as nothing. She is a possible answer to the question "What do women want?'' She is the artist of the deal. She is a balm to all those who fret themselves about the unsayable word "class." She is a reproach to the laggard American corporations which have been fatally postponing the essential business of vertical and horizontal integration.

It's a treat to watch her doing her NBC Today segment, with either Katie Couric or Bryant Gumbel mugging for the camera as Stewart explains a recipe, plans a festivity, or gives a social hint from one of her three homes-in-progress. Couric faithfully plays the "How do you do it?" career woman, full of feigned envy and forever marveling at Martha's sheer, brazen competence. Gumbel has the easier task of playing the man lost in the kitchen, pinafore likably worn, with a stock of wry expressions to pull as our Martha displays another culinary coup or confides a feminine wile or two in the hostessing line. My favorite moment is when Gumbel, with an air of "Well, all good things must come to an end sometime," turns to us and announces that there will now be a commercial break. What does NBC suppose the previous segment has been?

By "vertical and horizontal integration" I mean that Martha Stewart has got the market wired and trussed, like a poussin awaiting the herbal stuffing and the feathery baste of olive oil. Each TV segment furnished by the network—not that she doesn't have her own on-screen syndication—is a piece of plugola for a Martha Stewart book (published by Crown), the Martha Stewart Living magazine (published by Time Warner), a Martha Stewart video (tie-in to the books), a Martha Stewart classical-music dining CD with fold-in menu accompaniment (handled by Sony Masterworks), or a Martha Stewart brandname line of products (distributed nationally through Kmart). This is emphatically not Betty Crocker about whom we are talking here.

Joyce Cary once coined the term "tumbril remark'' to describe those offhand sayings by members of the nobility that were liable to incite thoughts of revolution. (A classic was that of a certain English duke, who, urged to economize by letting go one of his three pastry cooks, grumbled, "Can't a chap have a bit of biscuit when the fancy takes him?" Another came from a lady of the aristocracy confronted by a mendicant who claimed not to have eaten for three days. "Silly man," she trilled, "you must try. If necessary you must force yourself.") Powerful reminiscences of the tumbril surged through me as I viewed the Martha Stewart oeuvre. Talking about the new frugality of the 90s, she instructed one TV audience that "we're going to spend much less time in restaurants and country clubs and more time at home." This was a somewhat less than recession-proof remark (Stewart was an admirer of the Ross Perot campaign, which also sought to treat the United States as one vast business), but it was surpassed, I thought, by her observation to Paula Zahn on her new magazine during a segment about Christmas preparation. "This is something that everyone in the country can enjoy," she averred breathily, before gliding straight to an everyday discussion on the finer points of the serving of champagne, the care of crystal, and the maintenance of silver. Another TV segment featured a hot tip on the hollowing out and throwing away of the interior of a large and costly loaf of bread—the perfect Marie Antoinette sandwich surprise for all the family.

As trend tracker Faith Popcorn has put it, "Mass wants class and can recognize it. Martha's leveraged that beautifully."

Actually it's all what family, since while she was off promoting Weddings, a how-to guide for that blushing bride with a trunkful of time and a trust fund, she found herself husbandless as Andy Stewart, her lawyer-and-publisher spouse, left the matrimonial home. It is speculated that he found it tough sledding being wed to a one-woman deficit-reduction industry.

The phrase "domestic economy" takes on a new resonance when you consider the estimates and projections of the Stewart business. As the too perfectly named Faith Popcorn (she of the trend-tracking outfit BrainReserve) has put it, "Mass wants class and can recognize it. Martha's leveraged that beautifully." Mass wants class. I like it.

It's not normally considered kosher to speak either of "the masses" or of "class," but as long as you're not considered a troublemaker, then it's only another taboo waiting to be broken. And Kmart doesn't consider Martha Stewart a troublemaker, paying her about $5 million for a seven-year contract, in addition to royalties on her signature lines. At the other end of the social scale—Stewart says rightly but defensively that her output appeals "to people of all economic classes"—there have been seminars that could run you $300 a day or $1,000 for a three-day immersion. Topics in this design for living included "What Is Gold Leaf?," with the enticing subtitle "Edible and Decorative Uses," as well as the more homely "Entertaining with Your Collectibles" and the downright practical "How to Dispose of Your Valuables."

This all suggests, incidentally, that "mass" and "class" are more uneasy with each other than they like to let on. There's a great deal of status insecurity out there, and it vibrates powerfully to the influence of someone who can assure you that you are doing the right, the tasteful, the elegant thing. Stewart herself confides the ambition to create a garden "like Sissinghurst," the bower and boscage and arbor that sheltered the weird Vita Sackville-West and the no less fey Harold Nicolson. Some things never change, as they say in the attemptedly tonier ads for scotch whiskey, and snobbery about the great houses of England is certainly one of them, as Faith Popcorn can well attest from her trend studies.

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Great fortunes, Balzac once said, are often conceived in sin. Fortune did not come easily to Martha Stewart, who began life as Martha Kostyra in a large Polish family in New Jersey. And it would be truer to say peccadillo than sin. But before success started really cascading over her, when things were still a struggle and before she managed her vertical and horizontal integrations, Martha was much haunted by charges of inspired borrowing. They began with the publication of Entertaining, her first book, which featured recipes with a familiar ring. The orange-almond cake and the raisin-cherry pound cake in Entertaining certainly looked familiar to Julia Child, who had lovingly included them in her own volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child had also instructed people in the mysteries of the crusty mustard chicken, another formula which appeared later in a Martha Stewart book, Quick Cook.

The foodie world is a bitter and competitive one, roiled by great, passionate gusts which it is given to few to understand. What was the harvest when Martha's Chinese feast, laid out in gorgeous detail in the pages of Entertaining, turned out to have originated in Barbara Tropp's rival and predecessor volume, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking! After a fair bit of hissing and whispering, everybody faced the cameras with faultless smiles and acted like friends again; later editions of Entertaining concede that Barbara's book "inspired" the Oriental banquet, and Barbara sportingly wished Martha all the best with her future efforts. Still, even after that there was a certain Martha Stewart seminar spoken of in shocked murmurs, where recipes for a chaudfroid sauce and for a chocolate jelly roll were handed out on Martha's letterhead. The chaudfroid sauce was from Julia Child, I regret to say, and the jelly roll from The Joy of Cooking. In a way, of course, to be a culinary plagiarist is to be no more than an omnivore. The world of decorating, cooking, and embellishing might seem tender and feminine, but the laws of cutthroat capitalism are not suspended for allegedly "soft" subjects like bridal veils, menus, sconces, and flower arrangements. If anything, since these represent consumption at its purest, those laws intensify.

I have been married on occasion, so I looked up the Martha Stewart Wedding Planner. After only a few pages I was gripped by a stark terror.

I'm not a great cook or flower arranger or country-house refurbisher, so I wasn't sure if I was able to give some of the books and magazines a fair test. (The videos I found useful mainly as a language course; Martha likes to point out that spiedini is Italian for "skewers," and at one point instructed Bryant Gumbel that on this dessert he could spread whipped creme fraiche or, if he chose, whipped fresh cream.) But I have been married on occasion, so I looked up the Martha Stewart Wedding Planner. After only a few pages I was gripped by a stark terror. The tone is one of inflexible, pitiless correctitude. "It takes at least six months to plan a formal wedding (often longer) and at least three to four months to plan an informal wedding."

I'd only just gotten over that when I learned from Martha (everyone in her world calls her Martha, by the way) the concept of leaving nothing to chance. "Remember daylight savings time—you may find that your wedding is taking place in the dark when you had expected gentle twilight." Then, because facts must be looked squarely in the face, came an injunction to the bride to "keep your own monthly calendar in mind when scheduling the wedding date and honeymoon."

But all this, which I perused with mounting horror as it ran from "Budget' ' (with several pages for estimated as opposed to actual costs of boutonnieres and musicians—"check attire of musicians"—and videos) through tasteful hymnal selections, paled to nothing when I came to the honeymoon trousseau. All those gags about Wasp weddings ("How can you tell the bride?" "She's the one kissing the golden retriever") vanished before Martha's stem admonitions. "Accomplish as much as possible in the weeks before the wedding: shop, exchange money, buy travelers' checks, pack, etc." Then the travel-and-trousseau checklist: "First aid kit, Medications, Contraceptives, Tampons"—oh, Martha, not in that order, surely? Worse still: "Sewing kit, Scissors, Tweezers, Swiss-army knife"—let me out of here.

It occurred to me, as I read this alarming taxonomy, that Martha Stewart might think people were stupid. How dumb do you have to be in order to be reminded to "buy or borrow any luggage you need"? But then I reflected that this is really a stroke of genius. All over the United States there are millions of people petrified at the idea they might be doing the wrong thing. Many of them are also what Alan Clark, son of the great art critic Lord Clark, disdainfully refers to as "nouves." In other words, they have acquired a bit of capital but are mortally afraid of being thought vulgar. Books bought by the yard used to be a solution, but these days the pressure is more intense. How can I tell if this is a real antique? Will the boss laugh if we have him to a candlelit dinner and put Bartok on in the background? ("I don't think," said Martha's old friend Janet Horowitz, "I've ever been to a dinner party at Martha's that wasn't photographed.") What does one wear to the races? Are fish knives the sign of the phony?

Down all the ages, those who aspire to bourgeois status have been tormented by these worries. Tell us, O all-knowing Martha, how to avoid making fools of ourselves. Tell us what is appropriate. Martha Stewart's etiquette and entertaining guides may look like illustrated Filofaxes from hell, but they are the tools and building blocks by which all of us, one day, will do our duty and become middle-class.