White Lotus, the Weird Incest Family, and the Southern Literary Tradition

He is watching!

Someone in the White Lotus writers’ room has been reading William Faulkner. This season’s most disquieting family is straight out of the Southern literary tradition. The still-ongoing third season features a creepy, secretive, and borderline incestuous family from North Carolina: the Ratliffs. It isn’t a coincidence, I think, that this group comes from the South, or that their Southernness is repeatedly highlighted and exaggerated, especially through their accents.

With the Ratliffs, the show is playing off of a longstanding trope of Southern lit, in which incest symbolizes an obsession with white racial domination and the purity of the white Southern woman. Arguably, this family is the key to the entire White Lotus project, a kind of apotheosis of the White Lotus critique as a whole. By employing this motif from the Southern literary tradition, the show makes the point that tourism can be a kind of incestuous relationship: a way of cementing and affirming insularity.