










































Beyond Bars: How Print and 
Visual Media Contributed to 
the Exploitation of the Dionne 
Quintuplets and the Gosselin 
Sextuplets

In November 1997, a couple 
named Bobbi and Kenny 

McCaughey from Carlisle, Iowa 
gave birth to the first surviving 
septuplets in recorded history: 
seven babies born at once. The 
world was captivated, and a 
media firestorm ignited during 
the first months of the children’s 
lives. Then, in the midst of the 
coverage, Time featured an open letter written by three elderly women—
surviving members of the same set of quintuplets—to the McCaughey 
family, pleading with these new parents not to subject their septuplets to 
the exploitive powers of the media. The following is an excerpt from their 
letter:

Dear Bobbi and Kenny,
 If we emerge momentarily from the privacy we have 
sought all our adult lives, it is only to send a message to the 
McCaughey family. . . Multiple births should not be confused 
with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell 
products . . . Our lives have been ruined by the exploitation we 
suffered at the hands of the government of Ontario, our place 
of birth. We were displayed as a curiosity three times a day for 
millions of tourists. To this day we receive letters from all over 

  -  Amory Orchard, Ball State University

Abstract
This paper explores the depiction of the historic 
Dionne Quintuplets and the modern-day Gosselin 
Sextuplets in order to demonstrate how the 
emergence of mass media (e.g., television, 
photography, and print) made these children’s 
likeness into commodities. The author also 
focuses on consent and freakification of aspects 
related to the nuclear family and gender roles.

Digital Literature Review, vol. 3 (2016). © Ball State University. All Rights Reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce critical edition to dlr@bsu.edu.

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the world. To all those who have expressed their support in light 
of the abuse we have endured, we say thank you. And to those 
who would seek to exploit the growing fame of these children, 
we say beware.
 We sincerely hope a lesson will be learned from 
examining how our lives were forever altered by our childhood 
experience. If this letter changes the course of events for these 
newborns, then perhaps our lives will have served a higher 
purpose.
Sincerely, 
Annette, Cécile and Yvonne Dionne 
(“Advice from the Dionne Quintuplets”)

This firm, yet passionate letter was written by the then-surviving Dionne 
quintuplets (sister Yvonne died in 2001), who became world-famous in the 
1930s and ’40s for being members of a successful multiple birth consisting 
of five babies. For nine years, they lived in a zoo-like amusement park 
known as Quintland, their images and names splashed across print, film, 
and merchandise. Now, despite approximately seventy years since the 
Dionnes’ release, it is apparent that our society still remains transfixed by 
the idea of large families, especially multiples. 
 While advances in technology have brought countless advantages to 
the modern world, mass media production has also become a new mode 
of othering humans who challenge our assumptions about the world. It has 
been approximately nineteen years since the Dionnes sent their letter, and 
yet other multiples, such as the Gosselin sextuplets of Jon and Kate Plus 8 
and Nadya “Octomom” Suleman’s octuplets, have not escaped the media’s 
eye. The overwhelming primary purpose of this coverage is to entertain, 
not inform, an audience. While people were once displayed at crowded 
carnival sideshows and in museums, the more distanced portrayal of human 
difference in print and film (including television and newsreels) triggers 
much more distant and less empathetic connections with these subjects, 
forcing contemporary “human oddities” to become commodities. Media-
coined terms such as “Octomom” reflect how much these children are 
romanticized but ultimately dehumanized. 
 What attracts audiences to families with multiples? This reason is 
closely tied to the freak show: an exaggeration of or juxtaposition with 

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the ordinary. Just as the display of giants or little people found at circuses 
exaggerates size or shows featuring bearded women challenge what it means 
to be feminine, the Dionne quintuplets and Gosselin sextuplets ask us to 
reconsider our perception of the nuclear family, defined as a self-sufficient 
unit comprised of both a maternal and paternal caregiver and their progeny 
No other families of multiples have had their personas so widely distributed 
in the media as these two families. At the height of their popularity, these 
children—despite the wide generation gap—were so easily exploited 
because their depiction in both print and visual forms made them into 
commodities that simultaneously challenged and reaffirmed the values of 
the nuclear family.
 This paper will analyze four depictions of the two families’ “everyday” 
lives: two textual (one from The New York Times and another from People 
Magazine) and two filmed (scenes from the 1938 movie Five of a Kind and 
episodes from Seasons Three and Four of Jon and Kate Plus 8). I will draw 
upon media theory, psychology, and rhetorical theory in order to analyze 
and demonstrate how the media continues to encourage the ideals of the 
Western nuclear family by using the likenesses of vulnerable children. 
However, before one analyzes these media representations, it is crucial that 
one first understand the real stories of the children whose likenesses were 
used to sell an extreme and often idealized depiction of family life. 

THE FAMILIES
 The Dionne Quintuplets—Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and 
Marie—were taken from their impoverished biological parents mere 
months after their 1934 birth and remained separated from them for 
the first decade of their lives. Their parents were deemed unfit after they 
were caught putting the children on display in a Chicago-based exhibit 
to earn enough money to care for them. The children became wards of 
the Canadian government and were housed in a specialized hospital. 
Unfortunately, their new home became less like a hospital and more like an 
amusement park, and it was eventually dubbed “Quintland.” For the next 
nine years, the government encouraged an eager audience to pay admission 
at the gates in order to catch a glimpse of these child oddities playing 
behind one-way glass. The girls were, for the most part, unaware that they 
were being watched and were only allowed outside at certain times of the 

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day (Royal 442). Despite its initial attempts to avoid exploiting the young 
girls for profit by “saving” them from their parents, Canada had ironically 
put the children on display according to their own terms. The Canadian 
government abused its powers in order to profit from children who could 
give no consent when they were infants.
 The Gosselins were born seventy years later in 2004. It was Jon and 
Kate Gosselin’s second pregnancy after years of infertility treatments. As 
with the McCaughey family, there was a media storm after their birth, and, 
several months later, a television special from the Discovery Channel was 
released. After another successful special appeared on TLC, that network 
debuted Jon and Kate Plus 8 in 2007. The show featured all ten Gosselins: Jon, 
Kate, the twins (Cara and Maddy) and the sextuplets (Alexis, Hannah, Aaden, 
Collin, Leah, and Joel). The show was a commercial success and spawned a 
book series written by Kate Gosselin as well as tabloid media coverage. After 
it was revealed that husband Jon Gosselin was involved in an extramarital 
scandal, the parents divorced. Even after an executive decision to continue 
the series with the twist that Kate would now live as a single mom, the reality 
show was canceled in 2011 (Royal 2-3). Their show may have been founded 
on the idea of an unconventional family when it first aired, but it collapsed 
when the father figure was out of the picture.
 Jon and Kate Plus 8 had a five-season run from 2007 to 2011, and the 
Dionnes’ history seemed to repeat itself. Jon and Kate Gosselin consented 
to their children’s appearance in a reality TV show and permitted their 
children’s faces to appear in magazines and promotional material for the 
program. The sextuplets were never physically trapped behind glass or steel 
bars; the evidence of their exploitation is more subtle due to the affordances 
and constraints associated with print and visual media. In the end, through 
editing and other persuasive techniques, the directors and writers were 
handed control of the children’s representation. 

FREAK SHOWS, MASS MEDIA, AND COMMODIFICATION
 Humans have been put on display in forms of freak shows and human 
zoos for centuries. Yet what is important to note about the Dionnes is that 
they were born at a time when technology was making monumental strides, 
particularly in visual mediums such as film. Although it may seem unlikely 
to place news coverage, film, tabloids, and reality television shows in the 

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same category as freak shows, there are many connections between these 
examples of humans being exploited for capital gain. How that subject is 
perceived by an audience can be manipulated by whatever media is used to 
distribute their image. Much like a carnival barker’s stories about individual 
exhibits, the tale becomes a romanticized version of the truth that draws a 
crowd. When film was introduced in the early twentieth century, the freak 
show was brought to an audience who was not limited to the physical fair 
ground, where a traveling human exhibit would normally be displayed. In 
fact, some of the first films depicted freak shows and other human exhibits 
on screen (Thomson 56).
 Once this technology became more commonplace, the freak show 
had been transferred to a new medium that continued to encourage 
the idea that anyone who is not a normate is a source of intrigue and, 
therefore, entertainment. According to scholar Guy Debord’s “Mass Media 
and Commodity Fetishism,” “all that was once directly lived has become 
mere representation” (5). Any representation then becomes an object to be 
bought and sold by distributers. Once this happens, the audience’s empathy 
subsides, unlike if they were to see an exhibit in person at a traveling 
freak show. Disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson attributes this 
concept to what she deems to be an “ocularcentric era.” She writes that “the 
rapid flourishing of photography after 1839 provided a new way to stare at 
disability, [and in] our ocularcentric era, images mediate our desires and the 
ways we imagine ourselves” (57). The image permits staring more easily and, 
therefore, enables mass consumption of representations of human subjects 
like the Dionne or the Gosselin families.
 The contrast between Quintland and the films in which the Dionnes 
were depicted echoes the evolution of the physical, staged freak show 
to the big screen. Audiences were able to travel to Quintland to observe 
the girls playing in their nursery behind glass as if the children were in a 
zoo. Yet, when they were filmed, their activities eating and playing in the 
nursery were captured by the camera as it was rolling, edited at a later time, 
and placed in cinemas across the world. As with their feature film Five of 
a Kind—which I will soon discuss and analyze—sometimes the scripted 
scenes were intercut between scenes in which the children sang, danced, 
and (often) reinforced traditional gender roles by playing house with their 
dolls. While these are typical activities in which many children participate, it 

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is important to remember that the editors made conscious decisions about 
which shots from the hours and days of footage would be used to construct 
their version of typical childhood. The mass distribution of the Dionnes’ 
images led to movie ticket sales.
 Unlike feature films that have scripts, reality TV enables its subjects 
to—at least to some degree—interact with the camera by addressing the 
audience. They can, as Jon and Kate Plus 8 did, reflect on a previous event 
captured on camera and discuss their feelings about that incident. However, 
just how real are reality shows? If the genre’s purpose is to show what daily 
life is like for its subjects who are interacting in an environment they are 
accustomed to, how could this be harmful for child subjects? The reality 
television genre is no less exploitive than any other type of visual media. As 
scholar Lucia Palmer explains, “reality television is fabricated and packaged 
as much as any scripted program; its truthfulness is an artifice created to 
sell its products . . . [I]t is designed for a specific audience with a specific goal 
motivated by commercial factors” (124). 
 Palmer gives examples of some of the ways in which reality 
television is harmful for teenage and child viewers, including the dangers 
of mainstream heteronormativity and adult perceptions of beauty (128-
9). However, Palmer also cites a major problem with the way such shows 
challenge, but ultimately sustain, the cultural perception that large, nuclear 
families are ideal for Western life (125). For viewers of the Gosselins’ show, 
Jon and Kate Plus 8, it may seem at first that reality television provides a 
means to show the world not simply how hectic life can be with sextuplets 
but also how many aspects of their life are average. Yet, as I will discuss in 
the next section of this paper, the situations being captured in the early 
seasons are manipulated by editors to show a slice of life that is entertaining 
and appeals to the general public’s views on the nuclear family. Thus, 
although the draw for an audience is their one unusual trait (having eight 
children), to keep an audience invested, the show is built around traditional 
family values.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DIONNES AND GOSSELINS: AN ANALYSIS
 In this section, I examine the ways print and visual communication 
mediums—including film, television episodes, tabloids, and newspapers—
have been used to sell the Dionnes and Gosselins to the public. Although 

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these four different types are all able to capture the multiples’ “everyday 
lives,” text and film/modern television convey messages differently and, 
therefore, display these children in different ways. 

Print Mediums 
 As some rhetoricians and media specialists, such as Neil Postman, 
assert, print forms of representation in the age of television and film are no 
more virtuous than others; they simply allow for different types of misuse. 
According to Postman’s renowned 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: 
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, textual modes of communication 
before the age of television were “serious, inclined toward rational argument 
and presentation, and, therefore, made up of meaningful content” (52). In 
other words, print before the twentieth century allowed a media consumer 
to think more critically about what they read. Now the most popular print 
forms mimic television and film’s tendency to entertain rather than inform. 
While Postman never speaks on human exhibits in his work, his piece, “The 
Typographic Mind,” explains why the tabloids that cover the Dionnes and 
Gosselins read more like vivid scripts about domestic life than journalism.
 Both the print articles recount special occasions in these children’s 
lives, and both occur within a setting similar to a nuclear family’s home. 
Both pieces feature vivid language and primarily happy details meant to 
entertain rather than inform. However, the children’s own words are absent, 
leaving the writers or their guardians to speak for them. The first article is 
one from The New York Times, entitled “Dionne Girls Rouse Nursery 3 Hours 
Early to Investigate Pere Noel’s Bounty,” which is about the quintuplets 
waking up to a Christmas morning. The second article is a publicity 
article from People, detailing the sextuplets’ circus-themed birthday 
party. Both articles begin the same way: with a lighthearted opening, as 
in this example from the Gosselin article: “Raising eight children can 
be a circus – a comparison Kate Gosselin took to heart to celebrate her 
sextuplets’ birthday” (Corriston) and this one from the Dionnes’: “The 
Dionne Quintuplets awoke at 4:30 A.M. today and aroused the nursery 
to find out what Pere Noel had left for them. Thus began an exciting day 
of hijinks” (“Quintuplets Slide All Over the Place”). What is important to 
realize here is that the writers’ word choices themselves do not particularly 
exploit the children; rather, it is the way the articles are clearly meant to 

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be light entertainment. It disguises the fact that these children have little 
say regarding whether or not they want to be featured in the articles. Their 
guardians (The Canadian government and Jon and Kate Gosselin) allow 
the writers to speak for them. In fact, in People, only Kate Gosselin speaks: 
“All nine of us came together – dreamed together, planned together, set up 
together and enjoyed a huge milestone with tons of our friends” (Corriston). 
Their individual voices are lost in this collective “us.”

Visual Mediums 
 Print mediums may leave a consumer with a picture of the everyday 
lives of the Gosselin and Dionne multiples in their minds, but visual 
mediums like television and film are more harmful due to the notion that 
“seeing is believing.” In other words, television is highly selective, controlled 
by editors and directors to produce the most entertaining viewing 
experience for the audience as possible. In doing so, an audience may not 
consider what is occurring off-screen.  The children are surrounded by 
concepts that both reinforce and challenge some of the major constructs of 
a nuclear family: compliance with traditional gender roles and male/female 
parental figures. However, I will provide context for these media depictions 
so that we may better analyze them. 
 Both visual mediums starring these families of multiples feature 
parental figures—but these parental figures do not comply with the 
traditional mold of a mother or father. We begin with the Dionne sisters’ 
film, Five of a Kind (1938), a comedy starring the Dionne quintuplets as the 
fictitious “Wyatt” quintuplets—yet the characters still bear the real girls’ 
names: Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. The girls were only 
four-and-a-half at the time of the film’s release. The little girls portrayed as 
characters in the film are kept in a Canadian institution guarded by “kindly” 
white-uniformed nurses and their “kindly,” fatherly caretaker named 
Dr. John Lock (who is based on Quintland’s real-life Dr. Defoe). The plot 
centers around the competition between two radio journalists (portrayed 
by Cesar Romero and Claire Trevor) to be the first to put the quints’ voices 
on the radio. Intercut between the plot points, the film features long scenes 
depicting the tiny girls playing with dolls behind glass in a room similar 
to the one at Quintland, meeting puppies, and singing songs in matching 
dresses and bows (Five of a Kind 15:00, 17:00, and 41:49). Upon its release, 

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culture critic Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times condemned the film, 
proclaiming that the girls have “become victims of mass production” and 
deeming the Twentieth Century Fox film as a “factory-made product with a 
superimposed plot” (qtd. in “Five of a Kind”). However, in the same article, 
Nugent ironically laments that this film is not as entertaining as the two 
previous films in which the Dionnes starred. 
 In the season three premiere of Jon and Kate Plus 8 entitled “A Day 
in the Life,” the episode’s goal is to show the audience what a normal day 
in the Gosselin house typically looks like. The entire twenty-one minutes 
takes place at the Gosselin residence in the fall of 2008 and details what it 
is like getting the twins out the door to school as well as the antics of the 
sextuplets’ naptime and playtimes. Much like the Dionne film’s reels and the 
scenes from Five of a Kind, the toddler-aged children are filmed as they play 
outside, eat snacks, and occasionally smack each other. The Gosselins fit the 
mold of the nuclear family better than the Dionnes, who were taken from 
their biological parents as infants, because the Gosselins do have a mother 
and father present. However, the show is still compliant with the major 
appeal of human exhibits: it is a nuclear family but taken to the extreme. 
Jon, the father, still leaves for work while Kate, the frazzled mother, stays 
home to send the older kids off to school and then take care of six toddlers. 
In both instances, the Dionnes’ and Gosselins’ situation is simultaneously 
familiar—yet unfamiliar, which is where the intrigue and “entertainment” 
value comes into play. 
 While it is true that the depiction of the Gosselins does not seem 
to try to be perfect, both representations feature scenes where the female 
children adopt the roles often associated with their gender: taking care of 
other children or their toys. Here, the filmmakers and television producers 
have—much like freakshow owners—chosen to include these scenes without 
much preamble.
 In Jon and Kate Plus 8’s episode “Day in a Life,” one of the seven-year-
old twins is shown keeping the younger children under control, ordering 
them around the house to play games upstairs just as her mother, Kate, does 
earlier in the episode (17:00). There is a similar and—rather haunting—
scene in the Depression-era film Five of a Kind; in an extended scene, each 
of the little girls in their matching outfits simultaneously washes her own 
identical baby doll, then feeds it a plastic toy bottle, scolds it in French, and 

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tucks it into bed. All lined up, an image of an assembly line comes to mind: 
little girls behind glass learning to obey cultural norms with their imaginary 
children. These two scenes may seem innocent to an unassuming audience, 
but it nonetheless remains a conscious choice by the producers to include 
these particular scenes in order to emphasize the need for traditional roles 
in nontraditional families. 
 These examples are quite subtle. One particular instance, however, 
occurs during the first and second episodes of Season 4, in which the 
Gosselin family has a “boys’ day out” and a “girls’ day out.” Jon takes the 
four-year-old boys to a golf course and a fitness center, while Kate takes the 
five girls shopping at the grocery store and then to paint pottery (“Boys Day 
Out,” “Girls Day Out”). In this two-part episode, one of the boys even tries 
to get in the van with the girls and is carried away kicking and screaming 
by his father (“Girls Day Out” 10:00). This further highlights the underlying 
assumption that, even though Jon and Kate are raising so many children, 
they will still be raised to comply with dominant gender norms.
 One question remains, however: Given how popular the quints were 
at the time, why did the filmmakers feel compelled to make a fictionalized 
film? As popular culture historian Paul Talbot suggests, Quintland could 
only sustain the public’s attention for so long. As he explains, “When one 
looked at them for a minute or two, he had seen all there was to see” (Talbot 
81). Film, meanwhile, has the ability to manipulate its subjects to make 
them more interesting. It can place the girls in situations that they would 
not ordinarily encounter in the nursery. For instance, one scene shows 
the doctor presenting the five children with puppies. Then the camera 
rolls and captures the children’s expressions and, in some cases, screams 
of terror. Here, the scene’s entertainment value stems from the audience 
watching the girls to see how they will react and what cute things they will 
do, such as hugging a puppy or—as several of them do—running away in 
fear. Except for the scenes in which the Dionnes sing and dance, they do 
not have lines. In this way, it is strikingly similar to modern-day reality 
shows’ way of placing participants in a situation and letting the cameras roll. 
Then, before releasing this footage to the public, the editors manipulate 
and rearrange what is captured on film and shrink down the course of a day 
into an hour or half-an-hour. However, what is particularly significant about 
this film is that not only does the movie fictionalize the little girls’ lives, 

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but it simultaneously appeals to and challenges early twentieth-century 
assumptions about domestic life. 

JUSTICE FOR EXPLOITED MULTIPLES
 Of course, despite all the injustice these children have faced, not 
everyone in the public is entranced by the romanticization of multiples. 
There have, in fact, been questions and controversy regarding whether or 
not the Gosselin parents have violated child labor laws. However, according 
to one study conducted by The Akron Law Review, the Fair Labor Standards 
Act (FLSA) does not protect children depicted on reality shows because 
“though the FLSA governs child labor, it expressly exempts from coverage 
of children employed as ‘actor or performer’” [sic ] (Royal 456). Not only 
does this allow Kate’s children to be filmed using her parental consent, 
but the children do not qualify for protection from the law if any of them 
should sue their guardians, as the Dionnes did in 1998, approximately one 
year after the McCaughey septuplets were born. 
 Fortunately, Cécile, Annette, and Yvonne, the last living Dionne sisters, 
asked that they be compensated for their years in captivity and that they 
be given what share of the profits they were owed from the Canadian trust 
fund promised to them after they became wards of the state. In the end, 
they were given a settlement equivalent to 2.8 million dollars (DePalma). 
The women, along with their deceased sisters who never received justice 
when they were alive, were granted an apology and escaped the public life 
as best they could, but the Gosselins continue to periodically appear in TLC 
specials and tabloid-publicity magazines.
 Unlike the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the general public 
now condemns the display of human subjects at carnivals or museums. 
However, this certainly does not mean that the livelihoods of vulnerable 
populations like children are not distributed for entertainment. They are 
watched as they grow up into future spouses and parents, completing the 
cycle of the nuclear family. We are still drawn to individuals who exaggerate, 
and therefore challenge, our culture’s perceived notions of normal. It is 
crucial to study all reincarnated forms of the freak show—everything from 
reality television and film to newspaper and magazine articles—because, in 
an age when entertainment dominates most forms of communication, it is 
more difficult to connect “past consequences” with the future (Rich 371). The 

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merchandising of the Gosselins’ images after the Dionnes’ self-proclaimed 
hellish childhood in the public eye proves this, as laws allow their guardians 
to continue to speak for the sextuplets. 
 Still, there is a silver lining. Annette, Cécile, and Yvonne Dionne 
were granted their wish back in 1997: the McCaughey septuplets were 
never subjected to the degree of in-person attention or mass media 
distribution which the Dionnes had once endured. Now, at nearly nineteen 
years old, they have escaped a life filled with publicity photographs and 
merchandising—aside from an occasional interview marking a birthday 
or milestone. The question remains as to how the Gosselins (and any other 
famous multiples in the future) will fair in a world that still considers them 
oddities. 

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Dionne, Annette, Cécile Dionne, and Yvonne Dionne. “Advice from the 
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Five of a Kind. Dir. Herbert I. Leeds. Perf. The Dionne Quintuplets, Jean 
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“Quintuplets Slide All Over the Place as They Try Out Yule Gift Skates: 
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