They were five: The Dionne Quintuplets revisited

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 1994 by Wright, Cynthia

Of course, nothing like this came to pass and not just because the beloved Emilie was dead by 1954. Ultimately, the problem with the Dionnes was that, unlike Shirley Temple, they had relatively limited use in the most modern of interwar media: the radio and the cinema. Although their faces could be seen everywhere in the print media, the Quints' cinematic potential was severely limited after their third Hollywood film, Five of a Kind (1938), when they refused to speak English.(f.29)

Since many American tourists and English - Canadians had difficulty accepting (or even imagining) a French - Canadian existence (particularly in Ontario), the promotion of the Quints as tourist attractions had always been somewhat complicated by the fact that the girls were Franco - Ontarian. (As Welch's article documents, some French Canadians in Quebec wanted Duplessis to remove the Quints to Quebec so that they could feel at home as francophones and be managed for the benefit of the Quebec tourist industry.) To take just one example, the Quints were "anglicized" to become the Wyatt Quintuplets in all three of their Hollywood feature films.(f.30)

However, it was not until the Quints started refusing to speak English that serious problems began.(f.31) Not only did this drastically reduce their commercial potential over time, but it also very much limited the extent to which they could be relied upon to promote in radio broadcasts and rallies the British Empire, Victory Loans and good citizenship in general. Their refusal on one occasion to sing There'll Always Be an England caused a public uproar. In the end, the war took the Quintuplets off the front pages.

Today, hardly anyone remembers the three Hollywood films made with the Quintuplets, and Quintland as a tourist site no longer exists. The farmhouse in which the Quints were born has been transformed into a museum stuffed with souvenirs and memorabilia and moved to North Bay. While the museum draws its share of tourists, it is the exchanging of souvenirs of all sorts that animates the pages of the newsletter of the Dionne Quintuplets fan club. The actual experience of having been to Quintland is now secondary. MacCannell says of souvenirs that "To prevent the souvenir from becoming elevated in importance to the point where it breaks its relationship with the attraction, it is always represented as a fallen object, as no substitute for the thing itself, as something fallen from its own naturalness, something with a name."(f.32)

But with Quintland closed and two of the Quints dead, souvenirs and talk about souvenirs are now the primary means through which the Dionne story is circulated. No longer objects of the tourist gaze, the surviving Quints live in near - seclusion, while representations of them circulate in the flea markets and paper shows of North America.

The linked articles that make up this special issue all seek to examine the Dionne story anew. Our aim is not to destroy the pleasures of collecting souvenirs or being a Dionne Quintuplet fan, but rather to open up new questions and interpretations about the Quints, five girls whose construction as a natural wonder, as children, and as a "popular craze" has hitherto made them seem somehow outside the realm of historical analysis.