payment page
Beautiful and sexually forward, Meredith Dardenne is often described in If We Were Villains in terms of her physical presence. While Oliver, as the narrator, organizes much of this response, he is not the only character to comment on Meredith’s beauty. Even Alexander, who is gay, finds her attractive as a kind of femme fatale. But, as Meredith herself makes clear, her beauty is both a source of power and a kind of limitation. She worries that she is not valued for her talent or her intellect because people cannot see anything but her physical presence. Her sexual confidence is one of her most salient qualities. She is not shy about her desires and pursues sexual partners openly. Oliver finds her desire for him unlikely, and his self-doubt becomes a barrier to the development of their relationship. Of the group, she ultimately becomes the most successful, starring in a television program where she is usually scantily clad.
In a general sense, the female characters in the novel are less well-defined than the male ones. When the cast list is announced for King Lear, the group is surprised by the changes to the roles the men usually play but the women are disappointed to see no comparable rethinking in their assignments. The same is true of the novel itself, where the female characters prove flatter and less fully developed than their male counterparts. This is not to suggest they are not important to the evolution of the plot but, rather, that they tend to evolve less overtly than their male peers. Meredith provides a clear example. She does not confront Oliver after his confession, even though she had already shared her suspicions about James with Colborne, nor does she testify at the trial. At the end of the novel, her private life is described as private and lonely.
