SOURCE: Harris, Trudier. “Native Sons and Foreign Daughters.” In New Essays on Native Son, edited by Keneth Kinnamon, pp. 63-84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Harris investigates the role of African American women in Native Son.

The black women Richard Wright depicts in Native Son (1940) are portrayed as being in league with the oppressors of black men. Wright sets up an opposition in the novel between the native and the foreign, between the American Dream and American ideals in the abstract and Afro-Americans trying to find their place among those ideals, between Bigger as a representative of something larger and freer, indeed more American, than the limitations of the black community and the black women as representatives of a culture and a way of life that would stifle such aspirations. Wright thereby creates a paradoxical position for the black women in the novel. By preaching...