Realism and allegory in The Tiger's Wife

About 200 pages in on Tea Obreht's novel "The Tiger's Wife" at last to the chapter named The Tiger's Wife, which gives some sort of explanation as to who the TW is if not why she is the TW: as we had maybe suspected, the deaf-mute, abused wife of the butcher is the one the villagers call The Tiger's Wife - because she befriended the escaped tiger by offering the cat various delicacies from her husband's shop - when husband learned the tiger was in their vicinity he went off to kill the cat to protect the villagers - but the episode ended up with one of the hunters, inept with a shotgun, blowing his own head off - perhaps intentionally - as a side matter, the butcher found a pork shoulder near the tiger and knew or guessed that his wife had offered the pork to the cat - though it seems to me he would have suspected that the tiger stole the meat, right? Anyway, he goes back to his village, hurls the pork at his wife, then beats her - as he has been wont to do for many years. OK so why is she considered the Tiger's Wife and why is that identification to important to Obreht and central to the novel? This is a novel that functions well on a literal level and also functions on a symbolic or allegorical level, but at least up to this point - 2/3 of the way through roughly - the symbolism is evocative, suggestive, but elusive: it seems that the tiger symbolizes some form of freedom, repressed for years (kept in a zoo) and at last freed - but dangerous. And the "wife" - maybe symbolizes some kind of devotion to the cause of freedom and independence? Does all this somehow play into the Balkan history and to the Serbo-Croatian War? Obreht is pretty careful not to identify her novel too specifically with the literal events of the war or with widely known (if known at all) Croatian landmarks and locales: the novel has the mysterious sense of taking place in an imaginary space, and I'm thinking it might have been better and more profound reading experience if readers didn't know, from the jacket blurb and elsewhere, that Obreht is Croatian-born, came to the U.S. at age about 12 - and now only 26- and blessed with that remarkable sensitivity to language that enables those who learn English as a second language to write even more beautiful and striking prose than that of native writers: Conrad the best-known example, but more recently I think of her countryman Aleksander Hemon - his prose, and Obreht's, seems always to have a sense of how to use a familiar word in an oddly angled way or to find the right odd word to fit snugly into the odd corner of sentence.