Control and Freedom

Wow. Where to begin with the craziness? The first thing that I noticed upon reading “The Yellow Wallpaper”is the total and utter lack of control. The narrator can't control any aspect of her life, from whether or not to go see her cousins to the yellow wallpaper in her room or the furniture. She cannot even tame the pattern of the wallpaper, and it is this elusive pattern, this uncontrollable life, that first starts to plunge her into madness. She becomes less and less lucid as the story goes on, and she notices the woman “beneath the pattern” who is behind bars. To me her seeing this caged woman is almost like the narrator recognizing that in the uncontrollable life that she leads, underneath all of the decisions that are made for her, there is still one thing that she can control – herself.
She can control her own self, insofar as she can allow herself to posses or lose sanity. She does have control over the wallpaper in that she can strip it off in the same way that she does have control over her consciousness in that she can strip herself of it. The room seems like it has been used for this purpose before, with the bolted down bed, the “exercise rings,” the worn line around the room (which I'm not sure is there at the beginning), and the already somewhat torn wallpaper. I think that maybe she comes in and out of sanity, and it is the wallpaper that frees her each time, letting her conscious escape from the oppression of her (well-meaning?) doctor husband by leaving the realm of this world entirely.
This concept of leaving the real world in order to be free from oppression isn't exactly new, and we often see it in slave narratives, although there it mainly involves dieing, or going to be free with God in heaven. I think this sort of comes to mind on a second reading when the yellow wallpaper sprouts the deatheads of women.