Unquiet
Things

The new Wuthering Heights adaptation seems to be generating a frenzied onslaught of overblown responses. Early reviewers are calling it “lust worthy,” a “god-tier new classic,” a “beautiful mess of passion, destruction, lust, revenge, and unhinged behaviour,” praise that swells toward “explosive toxic desire.” The words weirdly float free of the thing itself; the reviewers can’t say what happens, so they’re throwing adjectives into the void, doing the best they can within the constraints of all they can’t yet say.

As I’m digesting this, thinking through this hyped-yet-hollow praise that lacks the substance to anchor it, I find myself returning to an image I featured in The Art of Darkness: Laurie Lee Brom‘s Cathy’s Ghost. Brom’s vision carries a somber intensity entirely free of sensationalism. When you stand before Cathy’s Ghost, you encounter a woman behind the diamond-patterned pane of an impregnable old window, her eerie luminosity against the gloom. Frost or mist obscures her form, yet she remains visible, more visible perhaps for the obstruction. Her gaze is piercing, direct, and the weight of that presence settles into you. Trapped behind glass. Held at the threshold between worlds.

Whether Laurie Lee Brom is painting a literary ghost or a woman in a 1960s kitchen, a figure contemplating a crystal ball, or a woman smoking behind rain-streaked glass, you don’t know what any of them are thinking. And yes, I’m aware of how that sounds. The unknowable woman. The eternal feminine mystery.  Etc, etc. But really, who knows anyone, anyway? Here we’re looking at women who exist in their own right. Solid and real, not a projection, not a mystery to be solved, not invented to satisfy your desire.

In Cathy’s Ghost, that solidity is what terrifies me. Her gaze cuts through the frost. Her fingertips press into the glass in a way that makes it feel insubstantial, like it’s yielding to her. She’s looking straight at you, and you have no idea what she wants, what she’s capable of. The glass between us feels like the only thing keeping me safe…except I’m not even sure it’s doing that. Maybe I’m fucked anyway. Maybe she’s getting me regardless.

In some of these paintings, the women occupy the edges of ordinary domestic life. A woman in a groovy psychedelic dress, vivid with orange and green and neon pink, standing behind rain-streaked glass. Another smokes a cigarette, bouffant insouciant, looking for all the world as if she’s about to meet her lover, Casanova Don Draper. A third gazes downward at a spider suspended on its web, her bright blue eyeshadow catching the light.

They could be contemplating the texture of their own existence, or they could be thinking about what’s for dinner, or the way their underwear is cutting into their bum, or an Alice in Chains song stuck on loop in their head, the one they’ve rewritten so it’s about their yappy dog now, “yeahhhh she wants to bite the roofers, oh yeahhhhh.” Brom doesn’t tell you which. She just paints them there, solid and present, their interior worlds as dense and unreachable as Cathy’s behind frosted glass. The settings are ordinary. The interiority is not.

Elsewhere in Brom’s work, she loads her women up with supernatural flair and costumes them in excess within a brooding, fantastical atmosphere. Vines and branches crown their heads, flowers cluster and wind through hair, ghostly hands reach from shadows, peacock feathers and stars and crescent moons adorn them. Gold and crimson and cobalt saturate the fabric.  It’s lush and dark at once—ornamental but eerie, decorated but shadowed. Every surface blooms with magic and strangeness.

Their eyes roll upward, turning inward the way you do when you’re contemplating deeply, searching your heart, taxing your memory, listening to your gut. Lost in your head. As these figures seem to be lost in theirs. All that ornamentation surrounding them can’t hold a candle to the landscape of their own thoughts, the interior worlds that exist only for them.

Brom portrays women’s interiority as constant and irreducible across all aesthetic registers. Whether she dresses them in gothic finery, domestic ordinariness, or fantastical excess, the core is always the same: a woman who is present, conscious, thinking, and fundamentally unknowable to us. This unknowability isn’t mystique. And maybe this isn’t about women’s mystery. It’s simply the human condition, the basic fact of human consciousness: private, impossible to fully reach. After all, no one can ever fully know what’s happening inside another person’s head.

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