Dido's wound is internal at the beginning of the book, but real by the end.

Dido's wound is internal at the beginning of the book, but real by the end.

• A. Damien Nelis
• B. Ian Du Quesnay
• C. Richard Jenkyns
• D. Philip Hardie

Answer: (A)

The idea being tested is how a modern critic reads Dido’s wound as a development: it starts as an interior, psychological ache and only becomes a real, physical wound by the end. This asks you to follow how Virgil stages Dido’s suffering—from a felt, inward pain rooted in love and betrayal to the outward catastrophe that literalizes that pain in her death and its aftermath.

Damien Nelis is the scholar who makes this precise claim. He analyzes the early portrayal of Dido’s anguish as something interior—the wound exists in feeling, memory, and emotional turmoil rather than as a visible injury. By the finale, however, the narrative and imagery convert that ache into an actual, bodily wound through Dido’s act of suicide and the ensuing demonstrations of her suffering. In other words, the text moves from a wound felt inside to a wound made manifest in the world, and Nelis focuses on this trajectory as central to understanding how Dido’s tragedy is staged.

The other scholars named deal with related aspects of Virgil, Dido, or epic aesthetics and reception, but they do not articulate this specific progression of the wound from interior to exterior as a defining claim in the same way.