Cecile Williamson Cary, from "Sexual Identity in 'They Flee from Me' and Other Poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt," in Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts IV, edited by Peggy A. Knapp (1987): 85-96.

In this essay, Cecile Williamson Cary challenges the assumptions about sexual identity underlying much critical writing about Wyatt's poem. She examines gender relations in the poem in the particular historical context of Henry VIII's court, where power and love were indeed intertwined, often in deadly ways. Though Wyatt employs the conventional notions of his time with regard to the relations of men and women, he also reveals contrary threads of male vulnerability, female power, and reciprocity between lovers.

My point is that he was betrayed not only by the woman, but by his own expectations of what men and women are. He had assumed that women were in danger, but he has discovered his own weakness: "In this structure of relation, it is women who are regarded as powerful and men who strive to avoid an awareness of their vulnerability in relation

to women, a vulnerability in which they regard themselves as 'feminine.' It is in this sense that one may speak of a matriarchal substratum or subtext within the patriarchal text. The matriarchal substratum itself, however, is not feminist."•1• Thus the speaker's suffering stems not only from the betrayal itself, but from his perception that roles have been reversed, that sexual relationships were not what he had thought with the man as hunter, master, free, in no danger from love. Furthermore, she has repudiated the episode and not suffered; she has done what men supposedly do, "love 'em and leave 'em." In the first stanza, the man is hunter and master; in the third, the woman is—he has "leave to go of her goodness."

If the poem is about the poet's relationship with Anne Boleyn (as the similarities in tone and imagery between it and "Whoso list to hunt" suggest), the ironies involve "sexual politics" with a vengeance.•2• Wyatt's time placed man as a power both in political and sexual relationships, but this woman not only repudiated the sexual relationship, but became queen, and the speaker is politically as well as emotionally subject to her

Notes

1. Madelon Gohlke, "'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Lenz et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 161.

2. Patricia Thomson, Wyatt and His Background (Stanford University Press, 1964), evaluates the relationship (pp. 20-30) and critical opinions about it (p. 276); see also Collected Poems pp. 266-67, for opinions relating to biography and "Whoso list to hounte." Jonathan Z. Kamholtz, "Thomas Wyatt's Poetry: The Politics of Love," Criticism 20 (1978), pp. 356-64, discusses both poems in a biographical context.