Janice Soprano

In a show full of diabolical characters, Janice Soprano is a strong candidate for the show’s most manipulative, and possibly least likable character. As the eldest of three children in the Soprano family, she is first shown as a pretty young daddy’s girl competing for her father’s attention with her younger brother Tony.

We first meet the adult Janice at the beginning of the second season. She also goes by the name “Parvati,” which is a name she picked up while studying eastern religions out on the west coast.  She and Tony begin arguing about their mother Livia from the outset, and we see Janice angling to exploit the situation for her own personal gain. Janice assumes her “hippie” persona when it’s convenient for her or when she’s giving advice to others, but quickly reverts to her manipulative self when her financial well-being is involved.

Janice continues scheming to get closer to Livia, and finds out from Meadow she enjoys music from an old group called the DeCastro Sisters. Janice listens to this music with her her mother, and they briefly bond as Janice says, “Music hath charms.” This newfound goodwill is short-lived, as Livia finds out her children have been discussing a “do not resuscitate” order regarding her health, and she angrily lashes out at Janice about this. Livia then expresses a desire to return to live at Green Grove retirement community, but Janice assures her she will take care of her back in the family home.

We see the opportunistic nature of Janice’s personality when she weighs in on a party Meadow throws at Livia’s house that results in some property damage. Janice is quick to stick up for Meadow and defends her independent streak using some thoughts from her Eastern philosophy. Then Janice sees the mess Meadow has actually made, and that it is going to affect the potential value of the home, which she has a vested interest in. She quickly becomes furious with Meadow as well as her parents for being too easy on her, and her complete turnaround on this subject again reveals the self-serving nature of her personality.

Janice soon reconnects with her former High School boyfriend Richie Aprile at a yoga class, and they discuss their past history and how they are both different people now. Richie brings Livia some flowers and begins his courtship of Janice, which he knows will have the added benefit of antagonizing Tony. When Tony drops by the house and sees Richie has spent the night, he goes from rage to angry acceptance, telling Richie, “She’s your fucking problem now.”

Janice begins manipulating Richie and encouraging him to defy Tony at every chance she gets. They begin engaging in bizarre sexual rituals, which include Richie holding a loaded gun to her head during sex. Never one to miss an opportunity, Janice even uses these strange occurrences to steer Richie towards the idea that he should be the one in charge. Despite Uncle Junior’s warning to Richie that “my niece is not a good kid,” Richie begins a plot to eliminate Tony.

Janice begins preparing for her wedding to Richie, and they attend engagement parties and go house shopping like a normal suburban couple. Things quickly change when Janice informs Richie that Tony doesn’t want him around his son, and Janice exacerbates the situation by bringing up Richie’s own son and his homosexuality. An enraged Richie punches her in the face, and in a shocking turn Janice gets a gun and shoots him in the chest and then the head, killing him.

A hysterical Janice calls Tony to remove the body, and her “soulmate” Richie is ground up in the Satrialie’s meat grinder to be disposed of. Tony mockingly tells her he buried Richie, “On a hill, next to a little river with pine cones all around.” Janice asks Tony “What’s wrong with our family?” and Tony explains that he goes to therapy where he learned their mother was a narcissistic personality. Tony goes on to explain that their mother was a person “incapable of experiencing joy.” Tony then puts a blubbering Janice on a bus back to Seattle as she laments, “I loved him so much,” in reference to the man she just murdered.

Janice does not stay gone for long, and at Tony’s insistence, she returns when Livia passes way. She quickly disrupts the entire situation, as she takes over the wake with a poorly conceived plan to have people discuss happy memories of Livia (no one has any.) We also learn Livia kept records of Tony’s childhood but none of Janice’s, which only increases her resentment.

Janice is quickly scheming again and performs a hard target search of Livia’s basement looking for her hidden treasure. She also finds out Livia’s caretaker Svetlana has taken her mother’s records, which results in Janice taking the woman’s artificial leg as leverage to secure their return. Janice incurs the wrath of Svetlana and her Russian associates, and Svetlana’s prophetic warning, “This cunt will be sorry she ever fucked with me,” proves accurate, as two men show up and physically intimidate Janis until she returns the leg.

Tony avenges this insult to Janice by savagely beating the man with the help of Furio Giunta. Janice begins to embrace Christianity with her new boyfriend Aaron Arkaway, a religious man who suffers from narcolepsy who asks virtually every person he meets “Have you heard the good news?” in reference to Jesus and the New Testament. Tony, who has seen how Janice’s various incarnations end, mocks her Christian music aspirations and throws food at Aaron during Thanksgiving, much to the amusement of the entire Soprano family.

By the fourth season we see Janice’s involvement with Christianity was short-lived, and she is soon snorting cocaine and having sex with Ralph Cifaretto in the bathroom at Tony’s house, despite the fact Tony is right downstairs. They begin an affair shortly after this, and their sexual interactions quickly become bizarre. Ralph enjoys being humiliated and subjected to pain during sex, and we see Janice penetrating him with a vibrator and pretending to be his pimp during one particularly difficult scene to watch.

Tony eventually finds out about this affair and reacts with disgust at Janice’s choices. Ralph eventually breaks up with Rosalie Aprile to be with Janice exclusively, but she has a change of heart after speaking with her therapist, and instead beats Ralph up in response to his declaration of love. Janice now targets the recently widowed Bobby Baccalierri after being moved by his display of emotion at his wife’s funeral.

Janice’s machinations to seduce Bobby are downright diabolical, and she begins using every technique at her disposal to curry his favor. This includes sabotaging the efforts of Jo-Jo Palmice, claiming Carmella’s meals as her own, and terrifying Bobby’s children with satanic messages online.  She takes an active interest in Bobby’s career and strongly encourages him to intimidate a man with violence to appease her Uncle Junior. In the end, Janice’s relentless manipulation pays off, and we see her and Bobby dancing together to “I got you babe” at the season finale of season four.

In the fifth season opener, we see that she and Bobby are now married, although there are tensions developing regarding Uncle Junior’s care, as well as Janice’s role as a stepmother. Tony and Janice get into a violent argument about this subject, and Bobby does his best to break it up. An enraged Tony ominously warns Bobby to “get control of your wife.”

Janice’s anger comes to a boil later that season, as she violently attacks another mother at her stepdaughter’s soccer game, and she is subsequently arrested. Her arrest makes the local news and Tony’s name is also mentioned, which infuriates him. Bobby realizes Tony is at his breaking point with Janice and delivers an ultimatum to her to either get psychological help or risk losing her marriage. Janice reluctantly enrolls in an anger management course.

Janice at first dominates the interactions at this course, and interrupts others and monopolizes the group time with her own complaints. She is called out by an African-American woman also taking the course, and seems to be finally grasping the concepts as time progresses. She demonstrates her newfound skills by peacefully resolving a conflict with her stepchildren and deftly dealing with a telemarketer.

A fascinating interaction occurs between Tony and Janice at the end of this episode, as Tony grows increasingly irritated at Janice’s new anger management skills, despite the fact that he was the one that wanted her to get her temper under control. He antagonizes her about her long lost son “Harpo,” and Janice fends off his first few comments, although Tony gets increasingly aggressive. She eventually grabs a fork and tries to stab Tony with it as she cries and screams, and a triumphant Tony walks away smiling.

At the beginning of the sixth season, we learn that Bobby and Janice have had a daughter named Domenica, and the camera pans to Janice breastfeeding the child looking very unsure of herself. Junior has also totally decompensated, and the three Soprano children are taking turns taking care of him, which is an arrangement Janice disapproves of. She and Tony have a heated argument about placing him in assisted living, and Tony screams at her in frustration before going to take care of Junior himself, where he is subsequently shot in the stomach.

Janice blubbers and cries during Tony’s coma, and when he regains consciousness she is quickly back to explaining to Tony how all of these recent developments have affected her. Tony is still irritated at her and Bobby for shirking their responsibilities with Junior, and tension remains between the three of them. Janice berates Tony for holding them back financially, and she and Tony again have words. Tony surprises her by securing her Johnny Sack’s huge mansion for half of its retail value, and Janice once again blubbers and cries, this time telling Tony, “No one knows what goes on in my head.” Interestingly, Livia made an identical statement in the first season.

In the final season of the show, Tony and Carmella visit Bobby’s lake house for Tony’s birthday, and Janice converts some old home movies from their childhood to a DVD as a gift. This episode begins with the two couples enjoying each other’s company, drinking wine, singing karaoke, and generally having a wonderful time. Tony even discusses moving Bobby into his inner circle as they have grown much closer now that they are related.

All of these good feelings are soon squandered during a heated game of monopoly, where a now drunken Tony repeatedly makes jokes about Janice’s appearance and her past sexual promiscuity. An enraged Bobby punches Tony in the face, and when they fight Bobby get the best of Tony. Janice is very concerned about this development, as she knows Tony and how he doesn’t forget things. In the end, Tony decides to make Bobby commit his first murder as a kind of punishment, and Tony ends the episode watching the old movies, which features Janice bullying him with a water hose.

In the final episodes of the show, Janice and Bobby argue one last time about Junior’s care, and Tony threatens to exile Bobby from the family in disgust. When Bobby is murdered shortly afterwards, Tony is supportive and makes arrangements to make sure Janice is taken care of financially in an agreement with the New York family. In what is likely their final conversation, she discusses the need to find a new husband now that Bobby is gone, and how she may try and make a go of it with Bobby’s children as a stepmother.

Analysis:

Dr. Melfi and others discuss a number of psychological diagnoses during the course of the show’s run. Tony tells Janice at one point that Dr. Melfi informed him Livia has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Melfi describes thrill-seeking men who act “like sharks that can’t stop swimming,” as anti-social personalities. Borderline personality is mentioned more than once in relation to a number of the female characters. With this in mind, it seems useful to examine how one might arrive at a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD.)

To be diagnosed with BPD, a person must show an enduring pattern of behavior that includes at least five of the following symptoms:

1.     Extreme reactions—including panic, depression, rage, or frantic actions—to abandonment, whether real or perceived.

2.     A pattern of intense and stormy relationships with family, friends, and loved ones, often veering from extreme closeness and love (idealization) to extreme dislike or anger (devaluation.)

3.     Distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self, which can result in sudden changes in feelings, opinions, values, or plans and goals for the future (such as school or career choices.)

4.     Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating.

5.     Recurring suicidal behaviors or threats or self-harming behavior, such as cutting.

6.     Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days.

7.     Chronic feelings of emptiness and/or boredom.

8.     Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger.

9.     Having stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms, such as feeling cut off from oneself, observing oneself from outside the body, or losing touch with reality.

In considering these possible characteristics with regard to Janice, it seems clear that she does meet criteria for this disorder. She is prone to bizarre sexual activity, is impulsive, highly prone to angry outbursts, and her moods are subject to rapid and frequent shifts. At one point she talks about having a gun in her mouth prepared to commit suicide, indicating at least some history of suicidal ideation.

Let’s consider the first two criteria; “Extreme reactions—including panic, depression, rage, or frantic actions—to abandonment, whether real or perceived.” And, “A pattern of intense and stormy relationships with family, friends, and loved ones, often veering from extreme closeness and love (idealization) to extreme dislike or anger (devaluation.)”

An example of behavior matching these descriptions is evidenced by her response to Richie Aprile when he slaps her in response to her questioning if his son was gay. Just moments earlier they were laughing and joking around, and just days before she was talking about him as her “soulmate” at their engagement party. And yet she responds to their fight by shooting him in the chest and then the head, showing how radically her moods can shift between idealization and rage.

This is also evidenced in her response to Ralph Cifaretto, who she initially pursues despite the fact he was in a serious and committed relationship with family friend Rosalie Aprile. At first, she indulges Ralph’s every sexual fantasy no matter how bizarre, and strongly defends him to her brother despite Tony’s obvious distaste for him. Later when he breaks up with Rosalie to be with her, she has a change of heart and reacts with violence towards him, ostensibly for not taking his shoes off before entering the house.

It is also useful to consider the criteria; “Distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self, which can result in sudden changes in feelings, opinions, values, or plans and goals for the future (such as school or career choices.)”

This seems especially relevant to Janice, as she is constantly trying on new careers, religions, and beliefs that seem to change rapidly in each of her various incarnations. Her version of herself as “Parvati,” a wise and learned woman drawing on Buddhist traditions is quickly abandoned when her own financial survival is threatened. Her dalliance as a born again Christian is also short lived, and she is next shown snorting cocaine and having sex with Ralph in a bathroom after she abandons this identity. These rapid shifts are indicative of the poor self-image and lack of identity that are the hallmarks of Borderline personality, and Janice in many ways seems a textbook case.

In making the final case for Borderline personality with regard to Janice, it is useful to look at her relationship history throughout the show to delineate a clear chaotic pattern. She and Tony constantly vacillate between love and hate, and she even encourages Richie to have him killed at one point. Richie quickly goes from soulmate to murder victim when he picks a fight. She pursues Ralph Cifaretto and then violently beats him for not removing his shoes. She describes Bobby Baccalieri as an “ideal” type of man to her therapist and then constantly insults and belittles him after they are married. These are not isolated incidents, but in fact strong evidence indicating the presence of a serious characterological disorder.

So how does a Borderline Personality Disorder develop?  Research shows a strong genetic link, and considering the violent and anti-social tendencies of her father and the manipulative and emotionally cruel behavior of her mother, it is easy to see how there may be a genetic piece to Janice’s personality. Growing up in chaotic and violent homes can also contribute to the development of this disorder, and in this case, there appears to be both a “nature” and “nurture” component to Janice’s personality style.