Revolt!

I do not see many similarities between Sarah Penn's revolt, and what happens to the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper".  The only similarity i really see is that both characters are women oppressed by men.  But that seems to be where the commonalities end.  Sarah Penn is a woman and wife in what seems to be the late 19th to early 20th century New England.  She laments to her daughter that, as women, they "know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes".  She seems to be surrendering to the patriarchal attitudes of the time, but then does something truly surprising.  As her husband leaves for a while, Sarah revolts against him and turns the new barn he built into the new home she has always wanted and deserved.  This is truly a revolt, as Sarah quite consciously did the opposite of what her husband had asked her to do.  But in the end, her husband acquiesces, and, weeping, offers to build her "everything you -- want Mother".  The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" on the other hand, is oppressed in a much more serious manner.  Her husband is a doctor, who refuses to acknowledge she is losing her sanity.  Since she has no physical symptoms, her husband treats her as child instead of as ill, and this compounds the problems she is having with her mental state.  By shutting his wife off in that macabre nursery, John has greatly contributed to his wife's descent into madness.  And that is how I see the wife's plight; the narrator does not revolt against her husband like Sarah does (although he forbids her to write, yet she explicitly defies him in this), but descends into a paranoid and delusional mental state, as evidenced by what seems to be a confession of her belief that she has become, or has been, the woman creeping behind the wallpaper: "'I've got out at last,' said I, 'in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!'".