‘Dancing Like a Bomb Abroad’: Dawson’s ‘An Itinerant House’ and the Haunting Cityscape

Abstract

Written just a few years before the publication of Emma Frances Dawson’s An Itinerant House and Other Stories in 1897, this description of the elusiveness of the largely forgotten San Francisco-based writer (once a close friend of Ambrose Bierce) suggests as much about the public perceptions of female authors, the anonymity of city life, and the slippery nature of Dawson’s own characters, as it does about the woman herself. The title story, ‘An Itinerant House’ (1896), recounts how, when Felipa, a young Mexican boarding-house owner, dies of grief following the discovery that her lover (Anson) is married, he and his friends succeed in bringing her back to life with the help of their combined medical knowledge, some frenzied violin playing and a rather hazy conception of the possibilities of magnetism. In direct contrast to Edgar Allan Poe’s customary narrative structure (explored in the previous chapter and below), which leads up to and abruptly halts at the moment at which the beautiful dead woman returns to life, the story unfolds from here, centering around Felipa’s outrage at having been forcibly returned to her body against her will.

Few women writers have so strong a hold upon the public as Emma Frances Dawson. She is known and not known. She is sought and cannot be found. Her name is spoken and all acknowledge her superiority, but the voice drops to a mysterious whisper as they enquire: ‘Have you ever seen Miss Dawson?’¹