What do the birds in "A Jury of Her Peers" and "The Story of an Hour" represent or suggest?

Birds are used in both of these texts to represent and
stand for freedom and joy as experienced by women in an otherwise harsh patriarchal
world where there is little opportunity for them to experience such liberty. Clearly,
the dead canary that is found in "A Jury of Her Peers" has much greater significance
than the birds that are described as "twittering in the eaves" in "The Story of an
Hour," but let us pay attention to how these birds fit in to an overall impression of
liberty that Mrs. Mallard experiences in this story:

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She could see in the open square before her house
the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath
of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of
a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows
were twittering in the
eaves.

Note how the sparrows
form part of the overall image of "new spring life," which of course foreshadows the
"new life" that Mrs. Mallard herself will enjoy, albeit briefly, now that she is single
and no longer has her husband to oppress her.

In "A Jury of
Her Peers," the bird is again explicitly related to the position of Minnie Wright. Note
how Mrs. Hale relates the canary to Mrs. Wright:

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"No, Wright wouldn't like the bird," she said
after that--"a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that
too."

Thus we can see how the
canary, a bird who sings, and cruelly had its neck broken, symbolises the way in which
Minnie Wright, who is so fondly remembered as Minnie Foster with a "white dress and blue
ribbons" and used to sing in the choir, slowly had all of the life choked out of her by
John Wright. Both were metaphorically choked by the same man.