Freak Show Quotes

“Ladies and gentlemen, everything you've heard is true. All that has been advertised is here, under this tent. Wonders, curiosities! A plethora of the strange, the weird, the bizarre, the unusual! From jungles untamed to forests enchanted. From the Dark Continent to the spice-laden lands of India. Astounding mistakes of nature are gathered here for your amusement and edification. What you're about to see will astound your very senses and harrow yes, harrow your souls.” (American Horror Story, Season 4: Freak Show Quotes.) In Dunn’s short story, The Nuclear Family: His Talk, Her Teeth, the main character Al creates dependence in the people around him by giving his children restricted options for employment, by treating his family as possessions

and not as people, and by addicting his family to drugs.
“Al was a standard issue Yankee, set on self-determination and independence, but in that crisis his core genius revealed itself.

He decided to breed his own freak show” (Dunn 22). After taking several financial setbacks, Al needed a way to profit that would earn him high revenue with a low cost. After visiting a rose garden Al was able to devise a plan to genetically engineer his own labor force. By breading his own freak show, Al was able to minimize the cost of running a freak show, while also Al securing a labor force that he would not have to pay. Since he did not have to pay his children, he did not have to worry about situations arising where his employees tried to barter for higher wages like his employee Mirabelle the pinhead had in the past” (Dunn 23). The beginning quotation is also the first time that Al brings up creating his own workforce through breeding. Al mentions where he got the inspiration to breed his own freak show. “It was a test garden, and the colors were designed. Stripped and layer. One color inside the petal and another color outside… The roses started him thinking, how the oddity of them was beautiful and how that oddity was contrived to give them value. It just stuck me-clear and complete all at once-no long figuring it out” (Dunn 23). In this scene, Al compares humans with roses and determines that he can “design” his own freaks for his

show.
Al then went from comparing humans to roses to obtaining a mentality that like roses, humans were something that could be possessed.

Al sees his children as objects that can garner him money, rather than human beings that are his flesh and blood. This is shown in the quotation, “‘my situation was far too humdrum to be marketable on the same scale as my brother’s and sisters’” (Dunn 23). To Al, not only were his children possessions, but his wife Lil was as well. The previous quote is not the only place where Al’s belief that his family is his possession is made clear. This notion is also reinforced in the quotation, “‘Al, you know you would never have got up the nerve to ask for my hand if I hadn’t fallen and got so bunged up. Where would we be now if I hadn’t?’ Papa nodded, ‘Yes, yes, and I made you walk again just fine, didn’t I?’ But his face went flat and smileless and his eyes went to the poster on the sliding door to their bedroom. It was old and silvered paper, expensive, with the lone lush figure of Mama in spangles and smile, high-stepping with arms thrown up so her fingers, in red elbow-length gloves, touched the starry letters arching “crystal Lil” above her.’” In this quote, Al can be seen wistfully viewing a picture of his wife in her prime, when she was making him the most money. He is viewing her as an object that made him money, and once she was no longer able to make him money in that capacity, he devised a new way for Lil to make him money, a way that would

dramatically increase Lil’s dependence on Al and would furthermore create a new generation that was dependent on him and the future of their freak show.
Lastly, Al used addiction to create a dependence in his wife. To create children with deformities, Al hooked his wife on various toxic substances in order to create unpredictable deformities in his children. Al convinced his wife that the only way for them to save the freak show was to create a new generation of freaks. This is proved in the quotation, “Lily seemed to view her addiction as a minor by-product of their creative collaboration” (Dunn 22). Though Al only provided drugs to Lil, the addiction carried on to her children. When a mother expose their unborn children to drugs, not only do the mothers take on the handicap of addiction their children do as well, which is proven when babies go through withdraws due to a discontinued exposure to the drug their mother was taking while pregnant with them. Lil rationalized her addiction by allowing the prospect of money cloud her judgement to such an extreme that she disregarded the physical consequences of letting Al genetically engineer their children. Al’s ability to convince Lil that it was okay to experiment with drugs to create the next generation of freaks speaks volumes of his pull over Lil, and furthermore her dependence on him. If she was less dependent of then she would not have let him convince her to experiment on herself and their future children. By purposely giving his children deformities he decreases their chances of survival in the outside world, which of course increases his children’s dependence on him.
As I have shown, the main character, Al, in Dunn’s short story, The Nuclear Family, forces the people around him to become dependent on him and the freak show for the rest of their lives. Dunn uses several examples to show how the toxicity of wealth pressures Al to see humans as disposable as roses. By abandoning the value of human life, Al is able to successful create a dependent labor force that is has high profit and low cost. I believe that Dunn’s message was to not let financial troubles pressure you to do something that could hurt yourself or others.