Who describes the 'Wounded doe metaphor' associated with Dido?

• A. Gildenhard and Henderson
• B. Ian Du Quesnay
• C. Susanna Morton Braund
• D. Damien Nelis

Answer: (D)

Animal imagery is a powerful way to show Dido’s vulnerability and the tension between her personal grief and political role in Virgil’s epic. The wounded doe metaphor frames Dido as a noble, yet endangered creature—strong in status and spirit, but suddenly, painfully exposed and pursued by forces beyond her control, including love, fate, and imperial power. Damien Nelis is the scholar who foregrounds this specific image, using it to illuminate how Dido constructs her own identity through a carefully chosen, emotionally charged animal metaphor. He reads the wounded doe as signaling not just personal injury, but the precarious position of a queen whose narrative is shaped within an epic that often renders female agency as threatened or consumable by larger ambitions. That interpretive move—linking Dido’s self-presentation to the wounded doe image—is why this option is matched to him. Other scholars discuss Dido’s rhetoric and imagery more broadly, but the explicit articulation of the wounded doe as associated with Dido comes from Nelis.