Let’s be honest, we’re taught to split the world in two.
Over here, in the quiet, serious corner, we have “high art.” The classics. The books you’re supposed to read. Over there, in the flashy, noisy corner, we have “low art.” Pop culture fluff. Reality TV. We’re told these distinct worlds don’t touch.
But, what if that’s just a story we tell ourselves to feel smart? What if the most vital stories, the ones that really dig into the heart of the American experience, didn’t disappear? What if they just learned to serve face?
I’m here to make a case. The most compelling, insightful, and brutally honest anthology of American narratives today isn’t found on a syllabus. It’s found on a runway. RuPaul’s Drag Race isn’t the trashy opposite of great literature. It’s its natural evolution.
All those big, messy themes from your 19th-century lit class—the crushing weight of shame, the glorious trap of reinventing yourself, the obsession that eats you alive—they play out in full drag every single episode. The library isn’t just open; it’s got a dip and a killer beat. Let’s walk its stacks.
The Scarlet Letter & the Rules of the Tribe
First, let’s talk about Nathaniel Hawthorne and his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter. Forget the simple adultery plot.
The Scarlet Letter is a blueprint for how communities police themselves. Hester Prynne’s ‘A’ is genius social engineering. It takes an abstract idea (sin, transgression) and makes it visible, tangible, and permanent. That scarlet letter is a public text, a way for the town of Boston to say, “this woman is outside our rules. Let her be a lesson.”
Hester’s life, exiled to the literal edge of society, shows us the space a group carves out for its outsiders. Yet, the real drama is how she fights back. Slowly, with immense grit, she changes the meaning of her brand. Through skill and sheer stubborn humanity, the ‘A’ starts to mean “Able” more than “Adulterer.” It’s a story about the power to define yourself when the whole world is trying to define you first.
The most compelling, insightful, and brutally honest anthology of American narratives today isn’t found on a syllabus. It’s found on a runway. RuPaul’s Drag Race isn’t the trashy opposite of great literature. It’s its natural evolution.
Now, step into the Drag Race werkroom. It’s a petri dish society. A new tribe forms instantly, with its own fierce, unspoken rules about polish, humor, beauty, and taste. The queens are both citizens and judges, constantly reading each other, sorting each other into categories.
For a modern textbook example, look at Season 16’s fascinating clash between the ultra-polished, Broadway-ready Plane Jane and the quirky, cerebral artist Mhi’ya Iman Le’Paige.
From the moment she entered the werkroom, Mhi’ya presented a very specific, physical, and conceptually playful style of drag. Her iconic flips and acrobatics were her language. To a queen like Plane Jane, whose ethos was built on sharp wit, strategic gameplay, and a more traditional, performative polish, Mhi’ya’s artistry could seem one-note, even unserious.
The critique wasn’t just about a talent; it was a judgment on a whole philosophy of drag. In the social hierarchy of the werkroom, Mhi’ya was subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) handed a label: the “one-trick pony,” the “tumbler” not the “thinker.” And here, we see the Hester Prynne turnaround. Mhi’ya didn’t abandon her flips. She embraced them. She argued for the athleticism, the joy, the unique spectacle of her craft. She took the very thing that marked her as a potential outsider in a comedy- and acting-heavy season and made it her undeniable signature. She didn’t conform to the tribe’s initial read; she expanded the tribe’s understanding of what belongs.
This is the core American story Drag Race retells season after season: the battle between the individual’s truth and the group’s label, and the revolutionary act of sewing your own label from scratch.
The Gatsby Dream & the Self You Invent
From the pressure of the group, we turn to the dream of the individual. And no one captures that dizzying American dream better than F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby isn’t a man; he’s a masterpiece of self-fiction. James Gatz looked at his humble origins, crumpled them up, and wrote a new life featuring wealth, mystery, and a fake Oxford degree. His tragedy is that he believed his own performance could become reality.
The old-money crowd, the Tom Buchanans, have the cold comfort of inherited identity. They can smell a performance, and they love to ruin it. Gatsby’s story asks the terrifying question at the core of our culture: if you can invent yourself, who are you really when the curtain falls?
This is where RuPaul’s famous line stops being a slogan and starts being profound philosophy: “we’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” Every queen on that stage is undertaking a Gatsby project. They are their own authors, building a persona from a chosen name, a crafted look, and a curated story.
This brings us to the “Delusional Queen,” the show’s most heartbreaking and hilarious archetype. She is the ultimate unreliable narrator of her own life. She believes so completely in the character she’s built that she becomes blind to the reality falling apart around her. For a classic, earlier-season example of this poignant tragedy, let’s revisit Mimi Imfurst from Season 3.
Mimi entered with the persona of the powerhouse, the workhorse, the undeniable force. This was cemented in the most infamous way possible: her lift during the lip-sync against India Ferrah. In that moment, Mimi’s self-narrative as a dominant, physical competitor crashed into the audience’s (and judges’) perception of it as awkward, desperate, and “too much.”
The gap between her self-view, the strong, strategic queen, and how she was being read became a chasm. Yet, in subsequent challenges and confessionals, Mimi often doubled down on the narrative of her own power and unfair treatment.
The judges, here acting as Fitzgerald’s old-money gatekeepers, saw the cracks in the facade. Their critiques were attempts to pierce the performed persona and reach the artist beneath, but the persona had become a fortress.
Mimi’s journey is a raw look at the perils of self-invention. It shows the immense psychic cost of clinging to a story about yourself that the world no longer accepts, and the isolating pain that comes when your Gatsby dream is met not with awe, but with a confused, cringe-worthy silence. It’s a reminder that in the theater of the self, the most authentic breakdown can sometimes happen mid-performance.
Moby-Dick & the Obsession That Eats You Alive
Finally, we must face the dark side of ambition. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is not about a whale. Let’s say that again. It’s about an obsession. Captain Ahab’s quest is a monomania. He sacrifices his sanity, his crew, and his humanity on the altar of revenge. The white whale stops being an animal and becomes a screen for Ahab’s own raging pain.
The lesson of Moby-Dick is timeless and grim: the hunt always, always destroys the hunter. The very pursuit that gives life meaning ends up draining all meaning from life.
On Drag Race, the crown is the White Whale. It’s a glittering, all-consuming goal. And while every queen wants to win, some become Ahabs. For them, the competition stops being about showcasing their art and starts being about annihilating a rival. The artistry vanishes, replaced by the cold, grinding gears of strategy and resentment.
We can see a razor-sharp, articulate version of this in the Season 15 tension between Mistress Isabelle Brooks and Luxx Noir London. This wasn’t a simple petty feud; it was a clash of titanic self-assurance. Both queens possessed immense, unwavering confidence. Mistress, the seasoned pageant queen and witty strategist, represented a traditional, commanding form of drag power. Luxx, the fashion-forward, reference-dropping intellectual, represented a new, hyper-self-aware generation of drag.
Their conflict became a philosophical battle for the soul of the competition. For Mistress, part of her “hunt” involved challenging what she saw as Luxx’s potentially hollow, referential approach, pushing her to show more vulnerability beneath the flawless looks. For Luxx, the hunt was about defending her aesthetic as valid and superior, proving that her kind of cerebral, fashion-based drag could win.
Each could become, in moments, consumed with proving the other wrong, with pacing the metaphorical quarterdeck of the werkroom, strategizing not just to win, but to prove a point about drag itself. Their obsession wasn’t with a person, but with an ideology the other represented. It showed how the pursuit of victory can twist into a crusade, where beating your rival becomes as important as, or even more important than, claiming the crown. It was a brilliant, modern take on Ahab’s madness: the obsession wasn’t with a beast, but with a reflection of yourself you desperately wanted to shatter.
Conclusion
So, here’s the point, without the wink.
American literature isn’t a museum wing, it’s a set of recurring problems we keep writing about because we keep living them. Who gets marked as unacceptable and why, who gets to rewrite themselves and at what cost, what happens when ambition stops being fuel and starts being an addiction. Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, and Melville didn’t invent those tensions, they just gave them durable forms. [^4][^10][^20]
Drag Race is one of the few mainstream platforms that stages those same tensions in public, every week, with real stakes for the people inside it. The show is obsessed with belonging and exclusion, with reputation and reinvention, with the slippery difference between confidence and self-delusion, with how quickly a goal can turn into fixation. That doesn’t make it “the same as” a novel, and it doesn’t need that kind of permission. It means the show functions the way major storytelling has always functioned in American culture, as a mirror and a pressure test. [^1]
If you take it seriously, you can see the pattern across eras. Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter is a community deciding what a person is allowed to be, and then being forced to watch that person outgrow the label. [^4][^6] Gatsby is the dream of self-creation meeting the harsh limits of social power. [^10][^12] Ahab is what’s left when purpose collapses into obsession. [^20][^15] Drag Race keeps returning to these structures because they’re still the structures we live under, just expressed through performance, taste, and a constantly shifting set of cultural rules.
So, if you’re reading Drag Race as “just entertainment,” you’re missing what it’s actually good at. It’s not only a competition, it’s a weekly argument about identity, status, desire, and the stories people tell to survive.