SCOTTY MONTGOMERY

You’ve probably seen the TikToks, or maybe the aesthetic boards on tumblr or pinterest. Chock full of gardens, quaint shanties, baked bread, and strangely a lot of frogs. Yes I’m talking about cottagecore. In case you’re not aware of this niche Gen Z subculture, cottagecore tends to its gardens and peacefulness on most of the popular social media sites, though most commonly on the ones that have visual and customizable platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and TikTok. Cottagecore cultivates a space away from the complexities of modern ultra-industrialized life and into simple, soothing experiences. Wikipedia describes it as “a pleasant portrayal of country life, an absence of advanced technology and industry, an appreciation for nature, and turn-of-the-century cottages”, “these works offer a form of escapism into a calm and comprehensible world.” I know it’s an academic faux pas to use wikipedia in research but I think its description captures an insightful analysis of this cultural moment. Cottagecore directs its focus towards the things that our current, hyper globalized world lacks. The accessibility of the internet and globalization of news and information constantly bombards us with more information from more places in the world than we could possibly know what to do with. And most of the focus of that news and information is on capitalistic ventures and industrial advancement, something which almost all of us feel we have little to no control over in the grand scheme of things. Cottagecore offers respite from the big complicated world that Gen Z has found itself growing into. Living in a quaint cottage with your own garden, your closest friends, and a self sustained little home provides a certain amount of control over your life and your environment that most people don’t feel they have.

Because of its therapeutic and calming nature it’s no wonder young people in the current times have flocked to the Cottagecore aesthetic. Some staple influences on the cottagecore scene are childhood classics and whimsical bedtime stories like Winnie the Pooh, Little House on the Prairie, Studio Ghibli, etc. Pieces of media whose “narratives revolve around friends and neighbors interacting in emotionally-supportive ways” go a long way in soothing a restless mind. “The characters regularly engage in domestic activities like sewing and baking, as well as social activities such as writing letters and visiting each other's homes” as wikipedia puts it. The cottagecore moment does a lot of work in fulfilling the peace and stability promised to younger generations in these childhood stories which the ‘real world’ pointedly lacks. These pieces of media have this very therapeutic and fulfilling component called unconditional positive regard. Unconditional positive regard is a principle in positive psychology that therapists use that help to instill support and understanding in their clients as well as build a positive and trusting relationship that incorporates genuine acceptance and understanding. First coined by Carl Rogers, unconditional positive regard means accepting “without evaluating or judging” and operates on the belief that “every person has the personal resources within to help themselves, if they are only offered the environment of acceptance to foster their own recognition of this”. 

Cottagecore creates this “environment of acceptance” in online spaces away from current global conflict that antagonizes struggling and marginalized groups. While Cottagecore has a historical element to it with the lack of technological and modern global crises, it rejects the outdated systems of oppression from the eras it is mimicking. It might be better to think of cottagecore online spaces as fantasy worlds like Lord of the Rings or those created in the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. These franchises take the warm and whimsical impressions of historical life and weave them into narratives completely distinct from those that would be occurring in an accurate timeline. Many cottagecore enthusiasts in fact incorporate traditional fantasy elements into their internet presence like @rachaelwilsonmusic on TikTok who dons elf ears for most all of her videos and calls herself “Freckled Zelda” (referring to the Legend of Zelda fantasy video game franchise) a “Music Fairy”. ‘Fantasy stories and games provide an escape but wouldn’t it be so much better if I just lived like that?’ cottagecore fans seem to be asking. Upon being asked if she would travel back in time by Paper, @nellahillxx eloquently comments:

“The lifestyle is beautiful but the times also had a lot of problems and discrimination that I would never want to be a part of. A lot of the cottagecore community can get lumped in with the tradlife/tradwife community because of this. We want to bring back the simple life of making jellies and living in the country but don't want to go back to the times of bigotry like racism, classism, or sexism that people have worked so hard to get us out of.”

In a way the current times seem to be living in a fantasy world, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. A dark sweeping pandemic was probably the last straw in cottagecore’s handmade wicker basket to really push its popularity. There is a need for love, support, and escape now more than ever so cottagecore sought to fill it. It’s no secret that certain brands and companies have flourished because of COVID-19 while others have floundered. One of the things people seems to be pouring their time and money into besides toilet paper and hand sanitizer are forms of cottagecore escapism. The most recent iteration of the virtual reality video game Animal Crossing, Animal Crossing: New Horizons which involves such cottagecore approved activities as bug catching, gardening, and diy furniture, was released March 20th; in the preceding 6 weeks the game sold over 13.41 million copies, “already passing the lifetime 12.55 million copies sold for its predecessor Animal Crossing: New Leaf”. As global outlooks sour, people are turning to “new horizons” of therapeutic fiction. 

No one has more of a need for comfort and escapism than minorities and marginalized groups. The recent surge of activism and outcry in the Black Lives Matter movement is exposing systemic racism and injustice that has been festering stagnant in American society for too long. Our current modern civil rights movement is shedding light on other forms and victims of oppression. Women and members of the LGBTQ+ community have found homes and safe havens in the cottagecore scene as places to be free, vulnerable, intimate, and open. The second item on the list when you type ‘cottagcore’ into the TikTok search bar is ‘cottagecore lesbians’. Lesbians or any wlw (women loving women) have the unique position of experiencing the oppression of a male oriented society but also the homophobia and fetishization of their attraction to women. Cottagecore really represents a reclaiming of activities and roles that are unfortunately maintained by the status quo as being done for men and not the woman or wlw in question. Women are asked to cook, clean, and manage families not for themselves but for others. A 2020 Gallup poll showed that women are still more likely than men to maintain household chores and manage household activities than men. While wlw are constantly being sexualised and objectified for male consumption. In a 2017 article, PornHub Insights sites ‘lesbian’ as the most searched for and consumed category of porn over the past ten years since their launch in 2007. Cottagecore allows women to self sustain and self care by gardening and baking for their own enjoyment and being intimate and in love without the feeling of performative exhibition. 

Self care and sustainability can sometimes find unorthodox role models. As I was doing my research I came across a common trend among the cottagecore lesbians of the internet: Sappho (and frogs). On tumblr the number of users or blogs dedicated to “cottagecore lesbianism” under some interation of the name Sappho was honestly surprising. On tumblr there was “Sappho’s Pet Frog” by user infaredss, “The Sapphic Muse” by user the-sapphic-muse, “Sapphic Cottagecore” by user sapphoscottagecore, and “A Warm and Safe Space” by user sapphocottagecore among many others. So I sought to understand why Sappho was so closely cherished by this fledgling movement and to say I learned alot about Classics in academia would be an understatement. To make a very long story short, the only things we really know about who Sappho was is that she lived circa 610-570 bce on the island Lesbos (which is actually where the term lesbian came from) and wrote brazen and beautiful poems sometimes on the topic of attraction to women that attracted attention from all over the ‘known world’ at the time. Sappho’s poetry, that is the parts of it that have survived, ooze of intimacy despite the fact that most greek poetry was expected to be read in the “communal voice” by a greek chorus. Daniel Mendelsohn writing for the New Yorker describes one of her poems as follows: 

“Slyly, the speaker avoids physical description of the girl, instead evoking her beauty by detailing the effect it has on the beholder; the whole poem is a kind of reaction shot. The verses subtly enact the symptoms they describe: as the poet’s faculties fail one by one in the overpowering presence of her beloved, the outside world—the girl, the man she’s talking to—dissolves and disappears from the poem, too, leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber.” 

Mendelsohn refers to Sappho as “the speaker” here to signify the “communal voice I mentioned before but also the fact that we do not know if Sappho was writing from the point of view of another person, probably more specifically a man. But this analysis really captures the intimacy of Sappho’s poems, especially her poems about women. “Leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber” of one’s own emotions is exactly the kind of intimacy and vulnerability cottagecore seeks to provide. And I think the way people envision Sappho affects the way they incorporate her into their posting online. We will probably never know that much about who Sappho was and her real and true purpose behind her writing but the iconography of her image, a woman writing her brazen and intimate truth on an anonymous greek island, speaks to wlw culture.  

Cottagecore is blooming to fill a need in the crazy and unfair world we find ourselves living in, a self soothing gesture of peace and acceptance. Baking bread and tending to flowers in a quaint cottage might not fix systemic oppression or institutionalized injustice but it does wonders in creating an environment for growth.