Hannah’s Reviews > The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature > Status Update

To ignore the complex pleasures of a poem like "Obedient Love" is to strip it of the lurid, violent erotics that is its most interesting—albeit disturbing—feature. It is to flatten out its anguished, complex, and perverse transcription of physical and emotional desire, reducing its emotional landscape to merely black and white outlines of sanctionable female feelings.