Like her, the canary had been caged and unlike her, when she sang, someone listened. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters found a bird in a cage with one of the door hinges torn off and this strangled bird in a box under some quilt patches. This is perhaps the clearest evidence of John Wright's domestic abuse of his wife. Minnie finally realized that just as he had quickly taken the life of her bird, so slowly and gradually he was doing the same thing to her. At that moment he understood that everything had to end. It was no coincidence that John Wright was strangled, as it says in the Bible, and eye for an eye, "rather than use an ax, this battered wife strangles her husband—a punishment fitting the crime" (Ben-Zbi 35). “Abused women become so demoralized and degraded by not being able to predict or control the violence that they sink into a state of psychological paralysis and become incapable of taking any action to improve or alter the situation other than killing the aggressor.” (upstream 22). Mrs Wright simply felt there was no other way out. Domestic violence is best described as a collection of factors that, when combined, force an intimate partner to live