The Southern Gothic of King of the Hill

By Joshua Chapa and Carissa Hayden

Presented by Joshua Chapa on October 11, 2019  at the POP-UP Academic Conference on Pop Culture

“It makes me nervous, that Joseph with Kahn Jr. His whole family like a Tennessee Williams play.” Kahn Souphanousinphone Sr.

It was easy to overlook King of the Hill. The Sunday night animation lineup on Fox was shifted either which way, due to NFL football, awards shows, or reality television. Countless shows didn’t even have the fortune of the eventually canceled and resurrected Futurama or Family Guy. King of the Hill was itself subject to many last minute renewals or near cancelations. The Simpsons owns its timeslot and eventually Family Guy got its own throne. While Bob’s Burgers has carved out its own place on the lineup, efforts helmed by newcomers and the Mount Rushmore of adult animation alike have failed to match the mere also-ran status of King of the Hill’s thirteen seasons.

King of the Hill is a late 20th century work of Southern Gothic literature. Various King of the Hill characters display traits common to those in earlier works of Southern Gothic literature. The works of William Faulkner are the primary focus for this comparison, along with Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor. Their consanguineous themes are present through the show’s entire run, but the episodes “A Beer Can Named Desire,” “Blood and Sauce,” “Duke the Dolphin,” and “Escape from Party Island” are particularly instructive.  

First, the fall. According to Joseph Gold in William Faulkner: A Study in Humanism from Metaphor to Discourse, Faulkner’s characters are ultimately responsible for their own downfall: “Those who are well acquainted with Faulkner’s work know that he has never represented man as the helpless victim of a hostile cosmos” (38). Of Faulkner character Thomas Sutpen, he states, “Sutpen is not the victim of a pointless cosmic irony. He plants the seeds of his own destruction very carefully” (38). In King of the Hill, the characters similarly create their own problems, though not all of them fall. The show’s namesake, Hank Hill, represents a constant struggle. The character is coming to terms with a changing South and changing views of morality. His adaptability, while slow and frequently against his will, ultimately prevents his own downfall. Other characters, some of whom regard him as their leader, are not so capable of following his example.

Hank Hill has many choices to make in King of the Hill. He could stagnate in his comfort zone and bring about his own destruction, or he can slowly change and adapt with the times. Many episodes see him fighting his inertia and eventually accepting the latter of the two choices. This is important when comparing to the downfall of the once prominent Compson family. John W. Hunt asserts that the Compson family’s degradation is a direct result of Caddy’s loss of innocence, or perhaps, the men’s response to it: “It is also true that the decline and fall of the Compson family is paced by the decline and fall of the woman from a position of virtuous eminence” (Hunt, qtd. in Bloom, 62). We can see that Hunt believes that Caddy’s overt sexuality has somehow directly impacted the family’s fall. However, it would not be fair to place the blame squarely on Caddy herself. Hunt continues, “Caddy’s failure is not from sheer perversity; she fails in Quentin’s terms, not her own. Her experiments in sex are ‘natural’ if foolish” (63). So while it may be tempting to blame Quentin’s suicide on Caddy’s sexuality, the blame actually rests on Quentin for being obsessed with his sister and her purity, or lack thereof. It would be easy to characterize Hank as the surrogate for an older audience aging out of comfort in a rapidly changing world, but the show resonates because of no true sense of what is normal or what that world is. Even twenty years later, the Bobbies have grown up and have inscrutable kids of their own. Mutability is a constant, and so discomfort with change is something everyone must face.

In Perrin Lowrey’s “Concepts of Time in The Sound and the Fury,” we see another example of Southern Gothic that can be tied to King of the Hill: “Frequently, he [Quentin Compson] attempts to think of himself as already dead, or to remind himself that he will soon be dead” (qtd. in Cowan 58). This statement regards Quentin’s narration of the hours leading to his suicide. Quentin avoids clocks and watches and all things related to time that day. Hank Hill similarly recognizes that his way of life is going to change and end. Hill doesn’t avoid clocks in the symbolic manner that Compson does, but he puts his proverbial head in the sand regarding a changing culture. He and Peggy are committed to raising their son Bobby and are content to stave off the boy’s “[ruination]...til after [they] are dead.” During Bobby’s unsupervised thirteenth birthday party, they admire the pair of his and her coffins Hank has built for them. The Hills have the best view of and hope for the future, but even then it is a struggle that others are not so fortunate to have.

The character of William Delatore Dautrive enables a transition from the state of Texas to the more familiar Southern Gothic setting of Louisiana in “A Beer Can Named Desire,” as we are taken to his childhood home. Although a neighboring state to Texas, it is an upside down, alternate reality for the Hills. Their son, rather than being an outcast due to his penchant for theatrics, prop comedy, and affinity for pop culture, immediately takes to life as a dandy gentleman of Louisiana. The belles of the episode are unimpressed with lady’s man Boomhauer, and instead pursue slovenly Bill. Lastly, rather than have to toil thanklessly for an ends-meet existence, the Hills have a chance at fabulous wealth.

The decadent fecundity of the South makes this offer at great personal risk for the Hills. In the kudzu and miasma choked swamp, Bobby is at risk of growing into something even more unfamiliar and terrifying to his parents. There is never any question of Bobby’s parentage despite his utter contrast to the two of them. Peggy’s revulsion for Bill disqualifies any possibility of infidelity and bastardity, and yet this is one of many instances of Bobby’s connection to his father’s friend. Bobby is impressionable and adaptable, and the Hills have to double their efforts to protect him from the swamp’s corrupting influence.

According to the Southern Gothic tradition, Bill easily embodies the notion of sex and death, becoming desirable to his widowed in-laws as the last person able to sire a male member of the next generation of Dautrives. Their respective husbands died out due to the Louisiana diet of barbecue and fried foods, and even his blood cousin Violetta is willing to rut with him so that she might produce the scion that will inherit the Dautrive’s land and estate. 

Conversely, Faulkner’s Quentin Compson struggles with his attraction to his sister, Caddy. John W. Hunt comments on Quentin’s obsession with his sister, “He is sick with his sister’s honeysuckle sweet sex, but he is also perversely attracted to it” (62). As many people are ashamed of their kinks and fetishes, and outwardly display outrage at others more secure in theirs, so is Quentin horrified by Caddy’s promiscuity while secretly craving her for himself. In King of the Hill we see that the incest is more akin to the royal incest: necessary to propagate the bloodline. In The Sound and the Fury, incest is treated as a more shameful, baser human failing.

Unlike Williams or Faulkner, the Dautrives did not lose their wealth or status. Their fate is one of swampy stagnation. There is no growth and neither is there an unsustainable or bastardized future. This is not to say they are a stodgy, spartan bunch. Indulgence and debauchery has ended them as sure as it did the Griersons or DuBois’s. Or as Bill’s cousin Rose said, “The Louisiana diet will kill a man as surely as a sword.”

Bill ultimately walks away from his family, moored to his recent personal traumas rather than be bound by duty to save his family from tragedy. Scandal did not ruin Bill’s life like it did Blanche or the Dubois’. The forwardness of his cousins is not what is shameful, it is their opportunism that perhaps justifies Bill’s decision to “play in the garden” rather than “till the soil.” Illegitimate bastards and most certainly bribed victims of sexual assault carved up the family estate and wealth leaving nothing for the surviving daughters. This destructive sexuality also haunted Blanche as it ruined her career (as a teacher no less) and attracted to her the reputation of promiscuity. Mitch, judging her as not good enough to meet his mother, rejects her upon learning of her reputation. Homer Barron was similarly not good enough for Emily Grierson. The failure of that relationship was her last straw. We see this inverted in the example of the Dautrives, and yet their doom is as certain.

Bill’s toxic relationship with his ex-wife Lenore (itself a link to the patron saint of Southern Gothic), shows doomed foreshadowing in the vignettes that recap their early days. Their eventual divorce breaks him, and he is unable to form a lasting relationship for the rest of the show. Even after he rebukes her. He is a slovenly, fat bald man in a time well before anything approaching the notion of body positivity. Throughout the run of the show, his trauma leaves him vulnerable to cults, freeloaders, body dysmorphic meat heads, and ill at ease in stable, drama-free relationships.

He does have agency. He chooses not to stay and sire an heir. He will leave his family to their well-deserved end. He has his own estate in Texas and Louisiana is not his home. Bill won’t find lasting love nor does he really want to change his life, as miserable as he is. At a talk commemorating the donation of the show’s archives to Texas State University’s Special Collections, writer and producer Jim Dauterive noted that Bill’s relationship with Khan’s mother was ended because there was no comedy in his happiness and stability. It would seem the Dautrives are responsible for their own damnation, in the end.

Or so it would seem. The swamp is not sterile but fecund. Those creatures suited to its environment prosper even where some would deem them unseemly or lesser. The Dautrive’s doom is entirely avoidable and self-inflicted. Were they satisfied with a female or homosexual heir, the family could remain extant.

The later episode “Blood and Sauce” gives us an update on the family’s decimation. Bill hopes to have a family reunion barbecue and invites all his family. We then learn that Bill’s cousin Gilbert is now the steward of the line after the deaths of their remaining family and dismisses Bill’s efforts to profit off of their family recipes (stolen from their servants and slave’s traditions) as beneath them. Rather, he sells their estate, plans to move to Austin, and to establish a literary magazine to continue their fruitless family’s name in letters (a plan for survival whose futility does hit a little close to home for the childless author of this paper).

While Gilbert’s homosexuality is certainly clearer than and yet still implied as Homer LeBarron’s, it is portrayed as a corrupting influence on Bobby and puts Hank Hill ill at ease during the family trip to Louisiana. It renders him unable to father children from his relationships, and his effete, dandy nature is at times predatory and always indulgent.

The show was progressive for its time, certainly. It favorably represented LGBT and yet here in this figure it was the product of its time. Gilbert is witty but ineffective, no doubt from a lifetime of growing up gay in the South and having to defend himself from the barbs of his family with his wit. He is quite capable of shutting down any homophobia, and is depicted with agency as he does take control of the family fortune and uses it to preserve their legacy in a way he sees fit, keeping poetry alive in the modern era.

He is simply not enough for his family. In his final appearance, he is a literal mustache-twirling rake who definitely and defiantly ends his family’s lineage, choosing to live a life of debauchery rather than allow his cousin to cheapen their status and market their family’s (actually servants’) recipes. Rather than consider 20th Century solutions to their problems, he prefers to maintain his elevated, and closeted, social status rather than chose an open, lower existence. It is unlikely he is any different than Bill, however, who regularly choses to “play in the garden” rather than “till the soil.” Which, while not financially dooming is dooming all the same. Just as “a gentleman must learn the difference [between] velvet and velveteen,” there is a “digni-tine” not dignity in his act, and the question arises if he is a stereotype or is bravely going out on his own terms.

This was not the first time Bill sought to adopt Bobby. Earlier in the show’s run, in the episode “Escape from Party Island” he is more brazen in his efforts to move into the absent Hanks role as patron of the Hill family. He accuses Hank of abandoning his wife and family to run off with three single women (in actuality, Tilly’s octogenarian friends). He is rebuked by Peggy and invites an ass-kicking from Hank, but this episode gives us insight into two other members of the Hill family who illustrate Southern Gothic themes.

First, Cotton Hill: the living embodiment of Toxic Masculinity. His mental abuse of Hank and Tillie during Hank’s childhood traumatized the boy and led to his unrepentant divorce from Tillie. He marries a classmate of Hank’s in their late thirties and eventually pushes her away as around the time of his death in Season 12 she is nowhere to be found.

Having been mangled in World War II, he is literally a little old man from a bygone era who spent his formative years installing asbestos in Texas buildings, literally spreading the poisonous substance while he tormented his family that must be taken down in order to move forward. 

He is not irredeemable. He is the only member of Hank’s circle who is able to identify Kahn Souphanousinphone and his family as Laotian rather than respond with stereotyical xenophobia. As the father of an illegitimate Japanese son, he made a personal peace with his wartime enemy and even though it was to make war, his world travels give him a more cosmopolitan perspective than many of the other inhabitants of Arlen.

His presence in the show is instructive. He is not to be loved unconditionally, even if Hank does so. His love for his son never extends beyond the slightest acknowledgment of Hank’s own abilities as a father, reasoning how “[he] made [Hank]” but “[Hank] made Bobby.”

One of Cotton’s final moments is to command Dale Gribble to blow up Hank Hill’s hated tool shed in an act that is quite similar to Abner Snopes’ own preferred hobby of barn burning. Just as the conflagration claims Abner’s life, so too does the explosion signify to Peggy that Cotton will never cease to torment his son.

Furthermore, the final member of the Hill family, Tilly is comparable to a number of characters from Southern Gothic literature. Similarities exist between Tilly Hill and Faulkner’s Caddy Compson. In Benjy’s chapter in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy remembers Caddy as a child watching their grandmother’s funeral procession. As a tomboy, 7-year-old Caddy had gotten her dress wet. This simple memory symbolizes the family’s expectations of Caddy as an innocent child. However, Caddy’s strength of will as a child foreshadows her strong will and unabashed sexuality as she grows older. Soon, we realize that Caddy is no longer an innocent child. While Hank Hill eventually accepts his mother’s sexuality, Caddy’s brothers never do. Benjy, who demonstrates characteristics of autism spectrum disorder, lives in the past of his memory. Hank’s discomfort with his and others’ expression of their feelings is speculated as the result of a similar condition.

However, Jason, who does not live with this condition, similarly lives in the past. His chapter begins with the words whose sentiments too closely match Cotton’s feelings about Peggy, Tilly, and women in general, “Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say” (Faulkner 140). This statement exemplifies his contempt toward women, likely a result of his incapacity for accepting his sister’s sexuality. This chapter, as well as the rest of the book, save for Quentin’s chapter, takes place in 1928, and is shaped heavily by the actions of Caddy’s daughter, Quentin (named for her late brother). Finally, Caddy’s brother Quentin commits suicide in 1910 after learning that his sister is pregnant. Quentin sees himself as a protector of Caddy’s virginity, while simultaneously harboring sexual feelings for her. When he learns that she has become pregnant outside of wedlock, by a man other than her fiancé, it proves more than he can handle. Thus, female sexuality is held to a higher standard than male, and in both King of the Hill and The Sound and the Fury, we see examples of men trying, and failing, to control women’s sexuality. We also see demonstrated how this failure ultimately destroys some members of the Compson family, while it is reluctantly accepted by (some) of the Hills. 

Tilly dealt with Cotton’s victimization by collecting miniature glass figurines as an escape. The breakable, useless objects no doubt represented how a perpetual victim might come to see themselves in such a relationship. Unable to shield herself or her son from her monstrous husband, she withdrew into regular funks, only to be able to steadily gain some agency with the figurines. Portrayed through the show as very progressive (for a senior citizen), Tilly eventually leaves her husband and enters into healthy relationships from that point on. Her healthy sexuality literally blinds her son when she is caught in flagrente delicto. Hank gets over it, however, accepting his mother as a fully actualized human being deserving of both physical and emotional love from partners who respect and value her. He comes to her defense multiple times afterwards, even when it brings him into conflict with his father. She rarely requires his own complete dotage, as she is a woman whose strength and agency does challenge small-minded individuals and their victims.

Although Emily Grierson’s overbearing father only appears as a shadow from which she can never escape, Tilly and Hank are consequently always contending with the abuse they suffered at the hand of Cotton. Emily’s relationship with Homer LeBarron is seen with disapproval from the town who view her as going below her station, even if they’ve kept her at arm’s length as a spinster.

A victim of his father’s toxic masculinity, himself, Hank has a similar influence over his mother, as expressed by his overprotective nature. He questions her agency as the result of her advanced age. He has trouble with each of Tilly’s boyfriends and is unable to grasp that she is her own woman who survived Cotton and learned from her experiences enough to not wind up in another abusive relationship. She has a renewed lust for life and will not be held back by anyone. She is not merely Hank’s mother (even if she is a side character throughout the majority of the show), but is a strong woman who desires and deserves companionship that she lived without for so long.

Hank Hill demonstrates an old-fashioned attitude toward sex, particularly the sex life of his mother. He would rather not know about it. Unlike Quentin, who felt sexual attraction to his sister, Hill is simply disturbed by the revelation that his mother is a sexual creature. John T. Irwin notes, on Quentin’s suicide: “...Quentin’s failure as both brother avenger and brother seducer in relation to his sister Candace [are] failures which his drowning of himself [are] meant to redeem” (Irwin, qtd. in Bloom, 71). Quentin’s concern for his sister’s virginity goes beyond a “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement that Hank Hill prefers. Rather, Quentin is unable to cope with the knowledge that his sister is having relations with men other than him. He also hates himself for having these incestuous urges, and the duality drives him insane. While Hank Hill’s traditionalism may not drive him to literal suicide, it is a metaphorical suicide of the clock advancing, while time stops for him.

Her preoccupation with collectible, glass figurines is similar to the china-painting classes Emily Grierson led in one of her few efforts to engage in society later in life. Delicate, valuable items that offered opportunity for fellowship with other women whose lives afforded them little agency. Whereas Tilly takes control of her life by leaving Cotton, Emily does so by murdering the man who spurned her. Tilly takes back a life of love, adventure, and agency, while Emily brings down the walls around her. The objects of her obsession are fragile and small, requiring great care to preserve their beauty and strength to defend them. Perhaps this is where Hank got the strength to not be devoured by the past.

Like Archer’s penchant for obscure literary references, King of the Hill abounds with other  allusions that expand beyond its mere categorization of Southern Gothic. Dale Gribble is modeled after Beat icon  William S. Burroughs. Khan’s daughter Connie regularly practicing works of classical music. Bobby studies classical clowning and stars as George Milton in a production of Of Mice and Men.

The reach of the show ironically is far reaching, considering how regional it is, and doubly so because while created by native Texans Mike Judge and Bill Dautrive, it was primarily written in typical Los Angeles writers’ room fashion. Japanese fandom is divided by those fans who prefer subtitled episodes which preserve the voice acting and authenticity to those who enjoy Japanese dubs of the episodes. This is similar to the  divide in American consumption of Japanese animation.

There has been talks of reviving the show, to the chagrin of purists who don’t trust the prime mover behind these efforts, fellow Fox Animation creator Seth McFarlane. Whether or not this happens, as we have seen with debate over other revivals, there will always be the classics that remain instructive and unassailable in their timelessness.

References

“A Beer Can Named Desire.” King of the Hill. Fox Broadcasting Company, 14 Nov. 1999. Hulu.

“Blood and Sauce.” King of the Hill. Fox Broadcasting Company, 18 Feb. 2007. Hulu.

“Duke the Dolphin.” King of the Hill. Fox Broadcasting Company, 23 Feb. 1999. Hulu.

“Escape from Party Island.” King of the Hill. Fox Broadcasting Company, 16 Mar. 1999. Hulu.

Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.”

---. The Sound and the Fury.

Gold, Joseph. William Faulkner: A Study in Humanism From Metaphor to Discourse. Norman, 

Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. Print.

Hunt, John W. “Quentin’s Moral Outlook.” Bloom’s Notes: William Faulkner’s The Sound and 

the Fury. ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 1999. Print.

Irwin, John T. “Quentin’s Suicide and His Dual Nature.” Bloom’s Notes: William Faulkner’s The 

Sound and the Fury. ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 1999. Print.

Lowrey, Perrin. “Concepts of Time in The Sound and the Fury.” Twentieth Century 

Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury. ed. Michael H. Cowan. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire.