"Shouldn't the wives of Siamese brothers be brought to trial for marrying a quadruped?" Louisville Journal asked. The very thought of unmarried twins married shocked Victorian America. Or were they looking for a scandal where it wasn't?
On April 13, 1843, a double wedding was held at the David Yates home in Mulberry Creek. The host's daughters, Adelaide and Sarah, married two brothers. And there would be nothing unusual in this, if not for the fact that the brides were fused with each other - they had a common liver. It was about the famous Siamese twins:Changa and Enga.
"Most Americans were surprised, shocked, speechless, disgusted, or simply distrustful," says Yunte Huang, author of Inseparable. Famous Siamese brothers and their encounter with American history ” . The relationship was condemned as "bestial" and the mere thought of it made me furious .
"They went to bed with two white women!"
Interestingly, the people of North Carolina, where the brothers settled, were concerned not only with the exceptional condition of the twins. Chang and Eng became convinced of this at the time when they made the decision that they would start trying to win them over. As Yunte Huang explains:
According to Judge Graves, the first difficulty the brothers encountered during their courtship was not because they were overgrown with their liver, but because they were "irremovable bias about their race and nationality" . Even if girls were tempted to accept brothers, their father was rejected by the prospect of marrying their daughters to swarthy Chinese who, worse, were also freaks.
Chang and Eng's relationship with the Yates sisters was resisted primarily for reasons of race. Photo of couples with children from 1865.
Under the legislation in force in the mid-nineteenth century, the association of Siamese brothers with white women was forbidden. Fortunately, the legal problems have been circumvented. After long negotiations, the couples (who are already planning to escape!) Also managed to obtain the consent of the parents of the future brides. "The charms of the brothers combined with their international fame and sizeable fortune proved irresistible," comments Huang.
Of course, in addition to the racial issue, there was also resistance to marrying girls for "freaks of nature," as Siamese twins were thought at the time. While Chang and Eng were already accepted as neighbors, the very idea of marrying local women was very negative. The windows of David Yates' house were broken and he was threatened with burning fields if he "did not look after his daughters" .
Widest bed in North Carolina
As brothers' marriages became a reality, Americans faced another challenge to their (in) tolerance. The imminent birth of children, of whom both couples had gathered up to twenty-one in three decades, indirectly provoked the question of having twins. It was even rumored that a specially widened bed had appeared in the brothers' house in Traphill - the largest in the entire state, and maybe in the country?
However, all discussions on this subject took place behind closed doors. Raising this issue in a public forum - as Huang tells in his book "Inseparable" - it was unthinkable after all:
There have never been any direct revelations of "how they did it" in the modern press, or unfettered discussion about it, and yet the mere fact that two conjoined Asians went to bed with two white women was enough to elicit voices of rage and condemnation .
It was only in the 20th century that authors began to speculate more openly what a sexual act performed by twins and their wives might have looked like. They imagined that the one who happened to be inactive must even wrap himself around the wife of the other to allow his brother to act. There were also even more dramatized representations from the point of view of a passive twin, observing (timidly? With desire?) His brother and sister-in-law during the act .
Or maybe "scandalous" relationships were not so scandalous? In the photo Chang and Eng with their sons.
"The reality, however, could have been a lot less shocking than we imagine," Yunte Huang said. How does he know this? Dr. William Pancoast, who performed an autopsy of the brothers after their death in 1874, asked the widows for information about their sex life. His report gives a surprisingly ordinary picture of the everyday life of couples:
The brothers (...) got so used to their unusual situation that they began to live and act according to their own rules as a single person. (...) each of them took turns taking control of the other's behavior (...). While it seems impossible and shocking that they were both in a marital bed with the wife of one of them, the application of the alternating reign was so profound with them that, as one widow told me, there never was any improper relationship between wives and brothers. .
It seems that even in such a difficult and delicate situation, Chang, Eng and their spouses were able to find a solution that offered a chance for a life not so distant from the relationships of their contemporaries. The case was perhaps best summed up by Chang's great-grandson Milton Haynes by saying: “How did they do it? Just like you " .
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Trivia is the essence of our website. Short materials devoted to interesting anecdotes, surprising details from the past, strange news from the old press. Reading that will take you no more than 3 minutes, based on single sources. This particular material is based on the book:
- Yunte Huang, Inseparable. The famous Siamese brothers and their encounter with American history , 2019 Poznań Publishing House.