These are my complete remarks prepared for the closing panel discussion with Exene Cervenka and Shana Nys Dambrot on July 12, 2025, 6PM at the Laguna Art Museum. This event marked the closing of the Carole Caroompas exhibit at the museum.
Wuthering Heights is one of the only artifacts that serves as evidence of the existence of 19th Century English author Emily Brontë, who passed away at the age of 30. Of course those of us who exist in the world of creativity know that to publish one novel before the age of 30 is no small feat. Especially given that (like most artists) Brontë had many interests. She played piano. She sketched. She painted. She cared for animals. She walked. She kept house. She shot guns. She studied languages.
It reminds me of what Carole Caroompas (who passed away at the age of 76) said in 1987 as follows: “I wanted to be an archeologist … then I wanted to be a poet … and then I was going to be a writer … and then I ended up being a painter, and the music and the language and the paintings all got thrown together.”
And here we are in this room to witness her body of work, where we can see firsthand the ways in which everything did get thrown together. Textiles. Paints. Literature. Prostitutes. Nipples. Ejaculations. Desire. The male gaze. That gaze volleyed back by the female. Heathcliff. Punk rock. Coercion. Free will.
This practice of juggling many interests as we work to beat the clock of mortality is something we all eventually confront. Surely Exene Cervenka doesn’t just tidily sing and only sing. Surely Shana Nys Dambrot doesn’t just tidily write art criticism and only art criticism. And surely all of us feel the tension of our impending end and our infinite interests. We write. We paint. We sing. We teach. We cook. We raise kids. We clean our cars. We have lovers. And maybe some of us shoot guns.
Emily Brontë also published several pieces of poetry and is said to have had a second manuscript for a novel that upon her death, became purposely set on fire and destroyed by her sister Charlotte Brontë.
(Charlotte published eight novels including Jane Eyre and died at the age of 39.)
(Another counterpart in that era of authors was Jane Austen who published seven novels including Sense & Sensibility, Emma, and Pride & Prejudice. Works that could be characterized as frilly romantic love stories. She died at the age of 42.)
So comparatively, Emily’s literary footprint is small. But when we consider her wide and varied interests, we are called to imagine that her ambition was not small at all, and her ideas were enormously messy, as evidenced by the untamed, complicated, rage-filled and downright unpleasant characters and plot tentacles found in the pages of Wuthering Heights.
As Constance Grady (Vox) points out, Wuthering Heights is not a frilly romantic love story. It’s about the cycle of generational abuse that is rooted in the rage and vengeance that Emily Brontë allows Heathcliff to exact throughout most of the book.
HEATHCLIFF
Heathcliff was a dark-skinned outcast raised to be a servant for the Earnshaw family, and as he lived in proximity to his sister figure Catherine Earnshaw, the two fell in love. But that love was not allowed. And so Catherine ended up marrying Edgar from the Linton family instead. The rage that consumed Heathcliff based on this course of events is understandable. Understandable and unpleasant. Because no matter the injustice, vengeance is unpleasant. Vengeance creates monstrous behaviors that replicate generationally. But the irony is that it’s understandable. So is rage.
HEATHCLIFF & THE FEMME FATALE GO ON TOUR
When we learn about Carol Caroompas the visual artist, we learn that like Emily Brontë, the artifacts that she left behind to serve as evidence of her existence is also small. Her body of work is not as vast as some of her contemporaries. But when we look closely at this exhibit in particular: Heathcliff & The Femme Fatale Go on Tour, we experience an echo of Emily Brontë’s signature work, Wuthering Heights, which is that Caroompas’ ideas and her ambition were also not at all small and hugely messy with lots of plot tentacles moving here and there, some unresolved and simply presented to the viewing audience to assault our senses. Because for Caroompas, it is to “assault the senses and change the world” that is at the nexus of an artist’s purpose.
And how exactly do we assault the senses? Caroompas would probably say:
By not keeping vintage tapestries at arms length and tidily nestled in a drawer.
By not keeping separated, the images of modern sex workers from the shapeshifting embodiment of Heathcliff from the 19th century English novel.
By making us grapple with the paradoxes of gender norms when we overlay issues of race and class and unrequited love all squished together, inviting us to consider that enslavement and freedom affect not just Catherine but also Heathcliff. Not just the femme fatale but also the resurgence of young devout women aligning with the ideas of rejecting ambition and embracing gender norms of modesty—so ancient that they are modern again.
Assaulting the senses doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to shake us a bit. It startles us and causes us to lose balance. And it causes us to experience compassion and understanding for unexpected actors.
Ultimately, I would say that we change the world by doing what Brontë did with Wuthering Heights and what Caroompas did with Heathcliff. To lay out onto the table all the grudges, all the rage, all the screaming, all the flaws along with all the passion, all the love, and ultimately, all the end to the commotion. Intergenerationally. By crossing genres from literature to music to visual art and throwing it all together.
I think the responsibility that Caroompas is potentially imposing on me and you and we, is for us to interrogate all the untidy tentacles of the world, particularly in relation to the roles that men and women have occupied. Do occupy. And will occupy. And to examine the impulses of vengeance and rage.
How does our gaze upon a man such as Heathcliff, along with our gaze upon assorted women of the night assault our senses and change the world?
Pragmatically, it does so because vintage textiles in most of our minds stay in a drawer not to be used in paintings but cordially considered as something that used to serve a purpose and that now exists to help us remember a time other than now.
Audaciously, those textiles become completely redefined and reused. They become the substrate that holds breasts, phallic symbols, ejaculations, innocence, corruption, bondage, pleasure through bondage, and freedom.
That Heathcliff is included in this narrative tells me that Carol Coorumpus is examining her own ideas about gender stereotypes, perhaps a nod of compassion and understanding of his suffering as she juxtaposes him next to the femme fatale who also needs compassionate understanding of her suffering. Perhaps each art object captures the stereotypes forever as we anticipate an exit strategy that might be found, out from bondage and into freedom.
No Coward Soul Is Mine
By Emily Brontë
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
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