The 'Cosey Corner': The American New Woman's exotic imaginary

This paper takes an in depth look at the “cosey corner” phenomenon in late nineteenth century America. Regularly termed “Turkish coseys” or “Turkish nooks,” these spaces were often marketed in interior design magazines and journals as a solitary space of relaxation for the woman who is unable to travel. As Kristin Hoganson notes, the popularity of cosey corners “helped make exotic interiors seem specifically feminine.” This paper examines the fantastical, Orientalizing trend as a space that did work for late nineteenth century women to explore and construct a self through appropriation of the “other.” Through conceptualizing the Turkish cosey as the conscious insertion of the “not
here” into the banal space of the everyday home, the nook fulfills and defies Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia.” That is a space that, through its normative design, reveals the illusory quality of real space and location, thus arriving at a break with societal norms. Just as the Turkish cosey reached peak popularity in the 1890s, a transitional moment between the stuffy and dark Victorian home and an interest in comfortable, modern
interiors, it also corresponds with the emergence of the New Woman. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes, the nineteenth century woman “fought in the name of a higher female virtue,” while the “New Woman” of the twentieth century wanted to be “as successful, as political, as sexual as men.” The cosey corner thus stages negotiations of identity, gender, and space within the private home through an amalgamation of objects
representing distant cultures in space and time.