ABSTRACT
The problem of providing a coherent explanation of this fascinating fragment has proven extremely difficult for scholars, not only because the lines themselves are so mutilated but also because ancient and modern critics alike tend to interpret the Distaff according to their own preconceptions of its creator. When the work was rediscovered, its use of a firstperson speaker prompted autobiographical surface readings that treated it as a young girl's naive and spontaneous expression of sorrow over a friend's death. After the techniques of close literary analysis had disclosed the poem's consummate artistry, one scholar cynically branded it an elaborate literary forgery perpetrated by an unknown male writer, designed to appeal to Alexandrian tastes by passing itself off as the pathetic outcry of a damsel in distress. In contrast, feminist classical scholars have recently argued cases for approaching the Distaff as a genuine masterpiece of women's art incorporating a female-ordered perspective upon experience. The focus of that experience is a matter of debate: for Arthur, the poem is a symbolic meditation upon selfhood and personal identity; Pomeroy thinks it concerned itself chiefly with literary creativity; Skinner contends that it examined the fragility of women's bonding and their enforced isolation within a patriarchal society. Because of its important aesthetic and cultural value, it should continue to attract the interest of all students of the female tradition in world literature.
