DOI: 10.62352/ideas.2034976 ISSN: 2757-9549

“Love Bade Me Welcome”: Repetition, Intertextuality, and the Uncanny in J. M. Barrie’s A Well-Remembered Voice

Ziyun Ma
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This article examines the uncanny function of the phrase “Love bade me welcome” in J. M. Barrie’s A Well-Remembered Voice (1918), a wartime one-act play concerned with mourning, spiritualism, and communication between the living and the dead. Rather than treating the play’s supernatural elements as inherently uncanny, the article argues that its principal source of textual uncanniness lies in the repeated and unstable circulation of a familiar phrase. Drawing on Freud’s account of the uncanny, together with later approaches to uncanny narrative and literary space, the article uses close reading to trace how the phrase changes status within the play: It first appears as a possible quotation, becomes an unexplained message from the dead, and later functions as a “password” to an undefined world beyond the room described in the play. The phrase’s source in George Herbert’s “Love (III)” further complicates this process. By transferring Herbert’s devotional language of welcome into a wartime séance, Barrie detaches the phrase from its original speaker and makes it a recognizable intertext whose apparent dramatic sender remains uncertain. The article proposes the concept of the “intertextual index” to describe this function: the phrase repeatedly points beyond its immediate dramatic context toward another text, another voice, and another possible space, without allowing those relations to become fully stable. The uncanny in A Well-Remembered Voice consequently emerges as a formal effect of repetition, intertextual displacement, and incomplete spatial crossing rather than merely as a consequence of supernatural subject matter.

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