While Ovid's female characters become physically and mentally enslaved in Metamorphoses, I will argue that a reader of Ovid's epic poem can empathize with her female counterparts, as she finds herself often dealing with disturbing situations and problematic circumstances within Ovid's text. The idea of ​​entrapment can then be extended from the character to the reader. Whether reading the Metamorphoses for pleasure or for academic purposes, it can be argued that a modern reader will feel somewhat challenged by the themes Ovid presents to it: scenes of rape, male dominance, and the frequent victimization of female characters. In this thesis, I have analyzed feminist theories and gendered genre in a literary context to support my investigations into what makes Ovid particularly distressing for a female reader to read. I will discuss issues such as how a woman reads and approaches male-biased texts like the Metamorphoses, how she is encouraged to read it, and how she might interpret it in a sexist way. In her article "Reading Resistance in Ovid's Metamorphoses," Genevieve Liveley discusses ideas like these in great detail, and it is with this article that I will begin my discussion. First, however, it is worth considering how we should approach Liveley's article, so that it can be interpreted in a way that relates it to my discussion. Liveley discusses various feminist visions of resistance to male-biased literature, some of which specifically relate to female readers of the Metamorphoses and some that are not so specific to Ovid. For this reason, when reading his article, it is sometimes easy to forget that he is actually referring to women... middle of the paper... regarding Fetterley's reading strategy of becoming a "resistant reader" , or indeed any another feminist reading attitude. This might suggest that a woman reading the Metamorphoses for pleasure and/or a woman reading Ovid for the first time will react differently to a classicist woman who would be accustomed to Ovid's controversial writing style. However, I would argue that at some point both types of women run the risk of feeling "trapped" in reading. A woman who reads for pleasure is probably more likely to empathize with the female characters in Ovid's poem and put herself in their situation. If this is the case, she automatically becomes "trapped" along with the female characters. This could easily be the case for an academic, although she also has the potential to feel trapped by feminist approaches, as I have discussed previously..