Pernette du Guillet's Rymes offer an interesting case study of woman's writing in which we witness the construction of a female subject caught between the submission to a masculine ideal represented by Maurice Scève, and the exigencies of équité (mutual companionship) transcending the essentialized gender differences inscribed in a patriarchal power structure. Although now and then du Guillet draws on elements of the neo-petrarchan tradition, the dominant tone of her scriptural quest emanates from the love theory of Leone Ebreo's I Dialoghi d'amore. In an effort to de-emphasize the anguish associated with the dominance–submission paradigm of petrarchan poetics, du Guillet's text constructs woman as a “writing effect,” represents the textuality of gender through the reconstitution of subject–object relations conceived as a utopian discourse of equals.

If Pernette draws on I Dialoghi perhaps more than any other work, it is because it enables her to seek refuge in a discourse that assures her protection from the objectification and surrender of “le mal d'aymer.” Quite clearly, the petrarchan discursive mode is based on a psychology of love in which the lover is the victim of the omnipotence attributed to the desired object. Within this code the idea of omnipotence can only emerge in the context of impotence and helplessness. In Scève's Délie, for example, it functions as a fantasy derived from a feeling of despair and helplessness.