Barbara L. Estrin, from "Wyatt's Unlikely Likenesses: Or, Has the Lady Read Petrarch?" in Peter C. Herman, ed., Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (University of Illinois Press, 1994).

Following Judith Butler's notion of "gender trouble," Barbara L. Estrin regards Wyatt's use of the Petrarchan model as deeply ambivalent, as he employs Petrarch's poetic conventions while rejecting the idealization of woman so central to Petrarch's ethos. She reads "They flee from me" as a poem of male retaliation against a female figure who would threaten not only the poet's sexuality, but his control over language.

The poem restructures the situation of Adam's Genesis 2 sleep. The aggressive woman is a reality. When she catches him in her arms, she contains him. Her imagination refocuses the mirrors of identity. The reversal—her replication of his initiative—doubles her hold. If sexuality is her idea, if she asks him what he likes but knows the answer, then textuality is her invention. She images forth the terms of his pleasure. That nightmare is the sexual and linguistic trap. The woman of "They flee from me" enters the man's chamber and controls his vision, casting him back into her chamber; the womb of female biological and poetic origination. Wyatt's reaction to this mise-en-abyme is to distort his Petrarch beyond recognition, as if he felt compelled to redouble the self in other poems to undo the doubling woman he imagines in "They flee from me." He disarms Laura by banishing her from the retaliatory poems and rearms the self by calling the semiotic "no" of "What word is that" his answer and the replicative body of "They flee from me" is the nightmare other, the woman of "Will ye see what wonders" of its own aggrandizing capacity. Doing without the woman Petrarch imagines as ideal means reimagining the man as retaliatory.