ABSTRACT
Burke’s conception of the white girl in Chinatown is a significant legacy of the pantomime Orientalism that informs the chinoiserie vision of Limehouse. Stereotypical Chinatown representation exploited the contemporary frisson engendered by the exposure of white womanhood to the racial Other, the thing ‘we are none of us too anxious to name.’2 Yet rather than the impecunious Irish slattern or Northern runaway of the popular press, Burke’s Limehouse girl is inspired by the pantomime waif of Victorian fancy. Like the ballet fairy in Aladdin, or the harem chorine of the Alhambra Spectaculars, she is the little girl made strange by her proximity to the Oriental, by her positioning as the focus of ‘perverse’ Chinese desire and by her own delinquent fondness for ‘curious kisses’.3 Limehouse Nights is a fetishistic response to the diverse spectacle of childhood on the latenineteenth-century stage, the lovable sprites of the slumland melodrama and the elaborately frocked, rouged and ringletted little girlhood of fin-de-siècle music hall: ‘This century for which Science promised a mature perfection’, despaired Max Beerbohm of the phenomenon, ‘is vanishing in a white cloud of pinafores.’4
