payment page
Mrs. Vane is Sibyl and James Vane’s mother. Without the support of her children’s father, she provided for her family by becoming an actress, and trained Sibyl in the same profession. Discussions with her son James reveal that James and Sibyl are illegitimate children resulting from a relationship with a married gentleman who physically and financially abandoned Mrs. Vane and his children. Consequently, a life of financial hardship has caused Mrs. Vane to be preoccupied by money. She and her daughter are under contract to the man who owns the theater, and their only chance of securing a better life would be to marry Sibyl to a wealthy gentleman such as Dorian. While Mrs. Vane confesses to her son that she has concerns about Dorian and Sibyl’s relationship – likely related to her own difficult past – she’s willing to put them aside for the promise of money.
A life on the stage has made Mrs. Vane bored of reality, and she craves the melodrama of theater in every interaction she has. She often dramatizes otherwise mundane moments in her life, behaving in a way that mirrors how the character of a mother would interact with the character of a son or daughter in a play. Her performative nature makes it difficult to parse how genuine her emotions or behaviors are. For example, the description in the newspapers of her tragic testimony after Sibyl’s death, which moved everyone in the audience, doesn’t suggest that she is truly heartbroken by the loss of her daughter so much as it suggests that she relished the opportunity to dramatize her own life and make a theater out of the courtroom.
Although she is often an unsympathetic character, she is ultimately a victim of the misbehavior and apathy of the upper classes. Each member of the Vane family represents the damage done to the lower classes at the careless hands of wealthy people: Mrs. Vane is impregnated and abandoned by a gentleman lover; Sibyl Vane commits suicide after being heartbroken by the fickle Dorian; and James Vane’s accidental death is brushed aside by his posh killers as bothersome rather than tragic.
