Martha Stewart has been indicted; Martha Stewart has resigned from the chairmanship of her company; Martha Stewart is in disgrace. But Martha Stewart Incorporated — or, more precisely, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. — lives on. Last week the company quietly announced it will begin publishing a magazine, Everyday Food, with an estimated distribution of a mere 900,000. The company’s new CEO, Sharon Patrick, said the experimental issues weren’t hurt at all by Martha’s indictment, and the company “is not skipping a beat.”

If the company does recover, that will not only provide a shot of optimism to legions of other companies with disgraced executives, it will also prove that the Martha Stewart phenomenon, as I have long suspected, is far more resilient than anyone previously thought. The fuss surrounding her is often inaccurately described as an ordinary celebrity cult: Much has been made, in recent days, of Martha Stewart and her allegedly perfectionist personality, of Martha Stewart as the focus of envy or admiration. Not nearly enough has been made of the peculiar fantasy niche that Martha Stewart Living (the magazine), “Martha Stewart Living” (the television program) and marthastewart.com (the Web site) have managed to fill, none of which have much to do with Martha Stewart (the woman).

For, like J.K. Rowling or Oprah Winfrey and her book club, Stewart, accidentally or on purpose, stumbled upon something missing from pop culture and supplied it. Children want to read something darker and scarier than the earnest, “educational” literature written for them these days — hence the Harry Potter phenomenon. Adults want to read something that speaks to them more deeply than airport romance novels, but don’t know what — and that’s why Oprah’s recommendation has just turned the almost forgotten John Steinbeck novel “East of Eden” into a runaway bestseller.

The explanation for Stewart’s endurance lies in a slightly different direction. Plenty of other magazines contain recipes and home decorating tips, but her magazine didn’t merely tell you how to cook, it told you how you could live a completely different sort of life, one in which you had an infinite amount of squanderable free time. The first issue I read contained a long, loving description of how to make your own Valentines, using family photographs, bits of tin foil, stencils and waxed twine. Valentines! I hadn’t given out Valentine cards in 25 years, let alone made them from scratch. I read on — and an alternate universe unfolded before me.

Every era has had its quintessential daydream, and this is ours. The practical Victorians dreamed of medieval romance and pre-Raphaelite maidens; we dream of having no phones to answer, no baby sitters to call. This may well be the source of our amazingly enduring and otherwise inexplicable national obsession with Martha Stewart, and it could be the clue to her company’s future survival — or failure.

Anne Applebaum is a member of The Washington Post’s editorial staff.