Quintessential Childhood: Showing Care in the Exhibition of the Dionnes

This article explores issues of curation pertaining to the exhibition of the Dionne Quintuplets. Born in 1934 in a small town in Ontario, the Quints were taken from their family to become wards of the province and viewed by over 3 million people in a specially constructed ‘hospital’ that served as the tourist attraction Quintland. For nine years the Quints were presented as exemplars of modern childhood. Two framing discourses will be explored: on the one hand, the presentation of ‘care’ and, on the other, the inscription of the Quints within an emergent aesthetic of ‘cuteness’. This analysis seeks to address the question of what it means to show care, as well as how the presentation of the Dionnes as ‘cute’ children attempted to distinguish their display from contemporaneous freak shows. While the curation of the girls’ within a medicalized discourse sought to present ideologically ‘correct’ bodies and images of idealized childhood, the freak show impulse to make their bodies profitable for consumption was nevertheless sustained by the state’s involvement in their display.