Sopranos Characters – Janice Soprano Baccalieri

*revelation*

Janice Soprano Baccalieri is a character on the HBO television drama. The sopranos. She is played by Aida Turturro, one of Turturro’s several famous cousins. The character is the older sister of the main character, Tony Soprano, and when she returns to New Jersey in the second season, she becomes a main character on the show. She is representative of the type of severe psychological damage that living in a criminal environment can create and, although she makes some progress, she never fully recovers from the type of damage she has suffered.

Janice, on some level, is in deep denial of the type of environment in which she lives. Over the course of the show, she continually tries to create some kind of “normal life” within the confines of the mafia world. At first, she plans to marry Captain Ritchie Aprile, a violent killer who believes that beating up women is okay, as long as there’s a ring. When that goes terribly wrong, she marries Bobby Baccalieri, a mobster who seems “nice” relative to the other mobsters. She even talks about her “her job” with him, as if he works in an office.

Throughout the show, we see the kind of psychological trauma Janice has suffered, both at the hands of her family, and later when she tried to move on but couldn’t. Her temper is literally murderous and she kills Ritchie after he hits her during an argument. Her temper causes a series of incidents when she manages to fight with the Russian mob that ends up beating her and nearly killing other people.

She also can’t stop manipulating people. Given her home environment, and especially her mother, she doesn’t expect at all that she can be counted on. As a result, she feels the need to manipulate people into doing what she wants. Even when she woos Bobby, she tries to manipulate him into needing her by scaring the kids out of him. Janice has two ways of dealing with people: anger and manipulation.

Even though she killed off Ritchie, Janice is one of the few people on the show that we really root for. She’s trying to get over the hurt she’s suffered, she’s well aware of what’s going on, but she can never figure out how to fix it. She finds a kind of peace with Bobby, at least temporarily, but the problems still persist.