Five Little Stars: The Dionne Quintuplets, Motherhood, Film and Tourism During the Great Depression

Abstract

On 28 May 1934, Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie Dionne were born to a francophone family living in a farmhouse near North Bay. The Ontario Government would declare the first-ever surviving quintuplets wards of the Crown and relocated them to a specially built nursery under the care of Dr. Allan R. Dafoe. Dubbed Quintupletland, the compound became the province’s most popular tourist attraction during the second half of the decade while the Quintuplets became Hollywood film stars. While other scholars and popular writers have examined the Dionne Quintuplets through various theoretical and emotional lenses, the interconnections between film culture, gender and tourism have not been considered. Drawing from archival and textual evidence, this essay considers the corpus of Dionne films as a significant site of intermedial and transnational socio-cultural exchange rooted in asymmetrical power dynamics and exploitation. It argues that Dionne filmography demonstrates the possibilities of film culture in establishing synergistic relationships between narratives of Hollywood stardom, medicalized gendered discourse and the tourism industry during the 1930s.