Unlocking the Mystery: The Surprising Secret to Choosing the Perfect Protagonist
If that’s what’s happened, then it completely makes sense to make the wife the protagonist. You may need to give her more air-time. You may need to rewrite a lot of scenes.
Or it may turn out that you don’t actually have to change very much, if that’s the story you’ve subconsciously been writing all along. Writing a novel has a way of bringing out things from your core that you didn’t know were there.
In any event, this approach could work quite well.
Option 3: Leave Your Lead Character the Same, but Change the Protagonist
This is a lot like option 2. The wife (or some other character) would now be the protagonist, while the lead character remains this cruel man.
