Inseparable

by Yunte Huang

  —Alice Dreger, “The Sex Lives of Conjoined Twins” (2012)

  Against the drab backdrop of the corseted Victorian Age, what happened in the quiet upstairs bedroom at the Siamese Twins’ house in Traphill, North Carolina—or how the conjoined Asian men consummated their double union to the two white sisters in a Brobdingnagian bed, made of pinewood, devoid of fancy drapery, facing a large window that overlooked the single-rock Stone Mountain—sounded like a racial burlesque utterly out of place. That sexual congress, condemned openly in the penny press and maligned secretly behind closed doors by neighbors, flew in the face of the norm of a historical era known for the erotic reserve and moral earnestness of the middle class, for the endless social campaigns for propriety, modesty, and conformity.

  As in those early Puritan colonies, or in Confucian China or any human congregation that tries to live by some rigid fundamental principles, sex for Victorian America, in the words of John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller, “represented a pandering to the lower instincts, a lessening of family structure, and a serious weakening of society’s order and stability.” The dissemination of carnal knowledge, the so-called twilight talk, concealed in hygiene manuals, etiquette books, and religious pamphlets, was calculated, according to the Hallers, “to impress their readers with sentiments of virtue and chastity, and offered the notion that physical love somehow interfered with the realization of society’s greater objectives. Discussions of sex predisposed the Victorians to an assortment of inferences in which sexual urges were somehow at variance with the search for morality and the proper definition of virtue.” Combining an undertone of Old Testament vengeance with strands of modern science and pseudoscience, which included Thomsonianism, Swedenborgianism, homeopathy, phrenology, and animal magnetism, the purity literature of Victorian America “portrayed sex as the most primitive human tendency . . . the aberrations of which were invariably detected and punished through disease and mental anguish.”

  One of the leading crusaders against sexual promiscuity around the time the Siamese Twins got married was Dr. Sylvester Graham, who prescribed in his widely circulated writings certain rules regarding the frequency of intercourse for married couples. Graham observed that American men were suffering from impotence, skin and lung disease, headaches, nervousness, and other maladies, and he blamed all of it on sexual excess in the conjugal bed. Believing that an ounce of semen equaled nearly forty ounces of blood, Graham recommended that, to avoid disease and premature death, healthy and robust husbands should limit their sexual indulgences to twelve times each year. In addition, he prescribed dietary changes for men to include such foods as unbolted wheat, rye meal, hominy, and his trademarked Graham flour.

  Another health crusader was John Harvey Kellogg, cofounder of the Kellogg cereal company, whose promotion of health foods went hand in hand with his advocacy for abstinence. Kellogg advised parents to prevent “silly letter-writing” between boys and girls in their early school years and campaigned for “eternal vigilance,” enjoining parents to guard the chastity of daughters in all their relations. Orson Fowler, the phrenology promoter, also joined in the crusade, stressing “the importance of phrenology in choosing marriage partners, which would enable men and women to seek those of similar thought and feeling through a searching analysis of the brain’s ‘soul-chambers,’ ” rather than relying on the ever-deceptive corporeal attraction and sex appeal.1 In addition, the tremendously popular behavior manual, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, combining cooking recipes with domestic protocols, also helped to codify Victorian sexual norms.

  Despite these social campaigns that earned the Victorian period a sterling reputation, reality was far more complex beneath the veneer of moral earnestness. As Peter Gay reminds us in his monumental study of Victorian sexuality, “The bourgeois experience was far richer than its expression, rich as it was; and it included a substantial measure of sensuality for both sexes, and of candor—in sheltered surroundings. It would be a gross misreading of this experience to think that nineteenth-century bourgeois did not know, or did not practice, or did not enjoy, what they did not discuss.” Tapping into a vast historical archive, Gay shows that the Victorians were publicly prudish but secretly prurient.2

  In nineteenth-century America, there was also a plethora of religious groups and utopian communities that openly explored nonconventional sexuality and challenged the traditional paradigm of monogamous marriage. The rise of Mormonism and its practice of polygamy was one obvious example. Also, in the wake of religious revivalism and under the influence of utopian ideologies imported from Europe, there arose in America sects, cults, and spiritualist settlements that experimented with different models of government, marriage, labor, and wealth: New Harmony, Yellow Springs, Nashoba, Brook Farm, Hopedale, Skan­eateles, Sylvania Association, and the Oneida Community. Take the last group, for example: It was a religion-based socialist commune, founded in Oneida, New York, by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 and dedicated to living as one family and to sharing all property, work, and love. In addition to communal sharing of all property and possessions, the Oneida members also believed strongly in a system of free love known as “complex marriage,” which allowed a member to have sex with any other member who consented. Regarding childbearing as a communal responsibility, the Oneidans paired women over the age of forty with adolescent boys, and older men with young women. As their guru Noyes put it, “the main idea was the enlargement of home—the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations.”3 To avoid pregnancy, Noyes advocated “male continence,” which became a voguish form of contraception in the late nineteenth century. “Noyes divided the sexual act into three stages: the presence of the male organ in the vagina, the series of reciprocal motions, and last, the ejaculation of semen. Since the only uncontrollable portion of the sexual act was the final orgasm, he claimed that with sufficient mental control, the male could voluntarily govern the first two stages, prolonging the motions of sex so that mutual satisfaction could be obtained without orgasm.”4 While some doctors looked enviously on the ability of the Oneida communitarians to prolong carnal pleasures, and others suspected that the only result of Noyes’s sexual experimentation was the substitution of “wet dreams” for natural ejaculation, moralists, not surprisingly, condemned the Oneidans. In 1843, the year of Chang and Eng’s double wedding, some of these utopian experiments, such as New Harmony and Brook Farm, which would inspire the Oneidans, reached their peaks. Comparing the frenzy of utopianism to the fire of the Great Awakening, Noyes wrote, “The Millennium seemed as near in 1831, as [Charles] Fourier’s Age of Harmony seemed in 1843.”5

  Adhering to no ideology other than the pursuit of personal freedom and happiness—however one defines or questions what “personal” means here—the Siamese Twins and their wives built a unique commune, a conjugal structure that was both within and outside the contours of traditional marriage. Having for so long lived a very public existence, the twins could not shelter their bedroom acts from the insidious speculations of tabloid peddlers and curious neighbors. There was never any direct how-they-did-it revelation, nor any unbuttoned discussion in contemporary print media, but the fact that two conjoined Asian men went to bed with two white women was enough to provoke outrage and condemnation. As we saw earlier, while the local Carolina Watchman merely referred to the union as a “marriage extraordinary,” and concluded the report with a comical jab, “May the connection be as happy as it will be close,” other newspapers were not so merciful in their attacks on the presumably unnatural, ungodly union. One paper suggested an indictment against the Yates sisters for marrying a “quadruped.” Another newspaper editor opined, “Were it not for the evidence daily afforded of what unnatural things men and women will do, we should pronounce the account incredible. What sort of women can they be who have entered into such a marriage? What sort of father to consent? What sort of clergyman to perform the unnatural ceremony?” As Orser points out, the fiercest denunciatio
n came from Northern abolitionist papers, which blamed sinful slavery for such an unsavory union. These papers printed the wedding notice in the column titled “Southern Scenes,” a section devoted to sensationalized stories of “murder, matricide, duels, drunken assaults, robberies, judicial corruption, and insanity” coming out of the slaveholding South. The papers treated the wedding as yet another proof of how the institution of slavery had corrupted the Southern soul. As Garrison editorialized in the Liberator, “None but a priest whose mind had become besotted by the impurities of slavery could ‘solemnize’ so bestial a union as this; and none but a community sunk below the very Sodomites in lasciviousness, from the same cause, would tolerate it.”6 What Flannery O’Connor said about Southern grotesque seems apropos again: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”7

  While the world looked on with horror and contempt, the twins and their wives went on to live their lives as married couples. Lacking information about those most intimate moments, biographers, novelists, and medical professionals have all tried to figure out the nature of the conjoined twins’ sex life. How did they do it? In the words of Alice Dreger, “People really want to know: what do conjoined twins feel when they have sex? If one is sexually stimulated, does the other feel it? If one has an orgasm, does the other enjoy the same, however unwittingly?” Was there competition, however playful, over male prowess? Was there peer pressure, encouragement, advice, or coaching? What about the wives? Did they feel embarrassed or excited about having sex in the presence of another man, a brother-in-law, who was literally lying next to her in bed? Would one sister feel jealous, suspicious, or resentful when the other was in bed with her man? Or—and here is the question many must have been dying to ask and yet afraid to do so for the sake of politeness—did the twins ever swap wives? Medical experts have stated that, “based on what we know about the significant variability of one conjoined twin to feel a body part (e.g., an arm) that putatively ‘belongs’ to the other twin, it’s hard to guess how any conjoinment will turn out in practice. Nerves, muscles, hormones, and psychology all probably factor in to who feels what.” Ultimately, as Dreger puts it succinctly, it all depends on what you mean by “having sex.”8

  Among the biographers of Chang and Eng, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace were perhaps the first to unbutton the taboo topic in a fair-minded way, without any hint of voyeurism. In their book The Two (1978), the father–daughter best-seller team speculated on how the twins might have carried out the bedroom act, when no sex manual, marriage tract, or etiquette book—all of which were widely distributed in Victorian America—could teach them how to go about it:

  Physically, the twins could not maneuver very far apart. They were bound tightly when lying down, too close for either to achieve any real degree of independent performance or privacy. In sexual intercourse, only the obvious missionary position—with the man on top—could have worked well. Yet it could not have worked too well. The anatomical restriction was always there. If Eng mounted Sallie [Sarah], then Chang could not be far behind—indeed, he would be dangling seven or eight inches to one side. Moreover, it meant Chang had to be curled against Sallie, partially covering her body throughout. The same condition would have occurred when Chang made love to Adelaide. Eng would have been drawn against or partially across Adelaide.

  Another likely position of copulation that may have been employed was that of the woman mounting the man. Whether the straitlaced prudery of the period would have allowed such lovemaking by Sallie and Adelaide will probably never be known. . . . As to the possibility of both couples making love simultaneously, it was quite possible with both women on top, but quite improbable with both men on top, because their mates beneath would have had to be lying one partially across the side of the other’s body, evoking images of an incredible orgy of flesh.9

  In his best-selling novel Chang and Eng (2001), Darin Strauss also tries to flesh out the details of the bedroom act, creating a plausibly complicated drama of sexual attraction among the four players. In a key section of the story, narrated in Eng’s voice, Strauss imagines the consummation of the double marriage in bold, descriptive language:

  My brother’s wife glanced at me, then her eyes darted away. She seemed to be talking to both of us through the anxious disappearance and reappearance of her smile. . . . I shut my eyes tight. The sensation of her leg touching mine was faint and natural. . . . And then my brother and his wife began to have relations. Chang stirred me yet again as he climbed on top of his wife and me. He was touching her breasts at the nipples as if he feared he’d never get the chance again. My arm was wrapped around my brother’s shoulder, and to make this positioning possible, our band extended farther than it should go. The inopportune logistics meant I had no choice but to curl against Adelaide, to cover her body partially—at the curve of her hip—and move along her leg as my brother rocked back and forth. . . . When she and my brother were finished, it took Chang a moment to separate himself from his wife. He was panting like a mackerel plucked into the air. And then Adelaide, smiling, was covering Chang’s mouth with her tiny hand, resting her head on his breast, and staring back at me.10

  In our treatment of this delicate matter, there is a risk of sensationalizing what might not have been so sensational a scene. The picture of two men in bed with one woman, for which the French have an elegant epithet, or of two men with two women, easily provokes, as the Wallaces term it, images of orgy. But the reality might not have been as shocking as we would imagine. The closest evidence we have ever gotten in this regard came from Dr. William Pancoast, the physician in charge of the twins’ autopsy in 1874. The eminent Philadelphia surgeon, after cutting open the twins’ corpses and examining every part of the anatomy, including the genitalia, also asked the widows the most sensitive question about their sex life and got an answer in return, as he wrote in the autopsy report:

  The twins . . . had become so accustomed to their curious relation as to act and live under certain regulations of their own as one individual. We were told in North Carolina that they had agreed that each should in turn control the action of the other. Thus Eng would for one week be complete master . . . and Chang would submit his will and desires completely to those of Eng, and vice versa. Though it seems most immoral and shocking that the two should occupy the same marital couch with the wife of one, yet so thorough was this understanding of alternate mastery, that, as I was told by one of the widows, there had never been any improper relations between the wives and the brothers.11

  What evolved in this strategy of “alternate mastery” was for one party to completely yield to the will of the other, a sort of self-imposed “blanking out,” a mental withdrawal. As incredulous as it might sound, at least one other pair of Siamese Twins, the Hilton Sisters, would attest to the feasibility of the psychological trick. Violet and Daisy Hilton, born in England in 1908 and joined at the hips, followed in the footsteps of Chang and Eng and became world-famous entertainers. Brought to the United States in their teens, they grew up to be vivacious young women, outgoing with men and attracting many suitors. Unlike Chang and Eng, however, the Hilton Sisters had trouble tying the knot when one of them fell in love with a man. Violet and her fiancé were denied a marriage license in twenty-one states on grounds of morality. In their self-defense, the Hilton Sisters explained how they managed their romantic involvements in order to avoid any hint of ménage à trois: They had “acquired the ability to blank out the other” in those key moments. When one sister had a date, the other would quit paying attention, sometimes by reading and sometimes by taking a nap.12

  In The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson; and the Comedy, Those Extraordinary Twins, Mark Twain worked the element of “alternate mastery” into a novel based on real-life Italian twins, the Tocci Brothers. His sobriquet indicating a preoccupation with two-ness, Twain had first seen an exhibition picture of Giovanni and Giacomo Tocc
i and had never been able to forget the striking image of “this freak of nature,” which he described as “a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs.”13 In Pudd’nhead Wilson, a work that unites two novels as one, like Siamese Twins, Luigi, one of the Italian twins, speaks to his brother Angelo: “My friend, when I am in command of our body, I choose my apparel according to my own convenience, as I have remarked more than several times already. When you are in command, I beg you will do as you please.” Angelo replies, “When I am in command I treat you as a guest; I try to make you feel at home; when you are in command you treat me as an intruder.”14

  How successfully Chang and Eng practiced “alternate mastery,” we will never know for sure. Their wives, as quoted above, did say that there was never any improper behavior in their shared bedroom. But impropriety is a loaded word, charged with biases, hypocrisy, and whatnot. Mormons were attacked for their practice of polygamy; Oneida communitarians would justify their sexual promiscuity in the name of a lofty idea, as would free-love advocacy groups of assorted stripes and colors. A ménage à trois among three singletons, depending on where one stands, would be considered variously as debauched, deviant, or delightful, while the sex act between two people in the unavoidable presence of the third person, as in the case of the Siamese Twins, would be considered freakish and bestial. Somewhere Sigmund Freud, the father of modern sexuality studies, admitted, “In matters of sexuality we are, all of us, the healthy as much as the sick, hypocrites nowadays.”15

  When asked in an interview about his illustrious ancestors’ bedroom acts that had led to his creation and that of his clan, Milton Haynes, the great-grandson of Chang, interviewed by Josh Gibson for the documentary film The Siamese Connection, gave what I believe to be the best answer, which should put the matter to bed: “How did they do it? As simple as you did.” Or, as Karen Tei Yamashita puts it in her fictional rendering of the Chang and Eng story, “Whatever speculations you may have about that incredible night and nights to come pale when one reflects on the reality and mathematic possibilities of position, sexuality, culture, race, politics, genetics, DNA. Bodies entangled upon bodies, the great union of Asian America with all women, with all America—mind, body, and spirit—the great gift. Amen.”16