For Helen Vendler and Stephen Booth, among others, the rhetoric of enslavement is ironic: it highlights the element of exaggeration in the speaker's rhetoric, thus hinting that those emotions spring more from self-pity than from justified hurt.
For Helen Vendler and Stephen Booth, among others, the rhetoric of enslavement is ironic: it emphasizes the exaggeration in the speaker's rhetoric, suggesting that those emotions stem more from self-pity than genuine hurt.