This thesis analyzes signs of the author’s negative attitude toward women, by examining the main characters’ identities and limitations in Richard Wright’s Native Son, one of the most famous novels of social protest, created a tidal wave of acclaim and made an indelible mark in the history of American literature. Against immense odds, Wright became America’s first best-selling black author, and his works have influenced generations of African-American writers and readers of all races. On one level, the character of Bigger Thomas can be interpreted, as he often has been, as a tragic or heroic figure who resists against white racism and achieves his self-consciousness. On another level, however, Bigger is a monster, a killer of two innocent women. He is alienated from his family, his gang, and the larger black and white community. Although Jan and Max are important to Bigger and his acquiring of identity by nourishing his social self, they do not solve his problems, nor do they have the power to change American society. As the title states, Native Son is the story of a black man, not a black woman. Bigger Thomas, economically, psychologically, and socially emasculated, unleashes his rage against female characters. Through Bigger, Richard Wright struggles to appropriate and thus dehumanize women by reducing them to pawns in the midst of male status conflict. Therefore women as characters in Native Son, are mere objects of this appropriation; they are desired as objects, but at the same time, contemptible in their weakness and passivity. Religion, alcohol, and sex are black women’s reactive activities which are characteristics of their personalities. They are all content to nag rather than nurture, and they are effectively silenced by Bigger and the author. Paradoxically, the final attempts of the text to cover the repressed phallocentricity and to achieve some sort of rapprochement between Bigger and the white male society that oppresses him are somewhat strange against this backdrop of violence against women. It is now time to uncover and examine the author’s prejudices about women and to scrutinize the previously concealed misogyny in this pivotal work of American literature, shaped by the absent Other.