Max wrote --
"We haven't mentioned one of the major features of the show for the first three seasons -- Tony's mother. She doesn't seem to fit easily into any systematic explanation of the story. She's just a volcano. The scenes between her and Tony's equally conniving sister are some of the best in the series too. Maybe these women are the dark side of Tony's drive for male assertiveness. He's got a lot to cope with. When you think of it, there have not been many shows like this with four powerful female figures. His daughter's no wimp either."
Interesting point. I think Dr. Melfi gets it right in the section where she figures out that Mama S. is scheming to have Tony killed. Melfi, if you recall, steps somewhat out of the usual therapeutic rôle, and justifies it by saying Tony's life is in danger. Significantly, she reaches for DSM IV, and reads the criteria for "Borderline Personality Disorder," which is clearly a correct interpretation of Livia S. (Note that "Livia" was the name of the wife, and long-surviving widow of the Emperor Augustus, one of the most notorious historical conniving tyrants and murderers, a famous poisoned, nicely portrayed in Graves' I CLAUDIUS).
The psychoanalytic literature on Borderline Personality is very interesting, and calls for a political interpretation, mostly because it captures the details of advanced degeneration of the bourgeois ego. Just as the Frankfurt School appropriated the psychoanalytic thought of 75 years ago in a fruitful way, we need to do the same now. Much of the change in social reality has led to fundamental shifts in family relationships, with corresponding changes in the nature of oedipality. Livia's mixture of seduction and menace (Remember the sequence of Tony as a child when she threatens to put his eyes out with a fork.) is a gross deterioratoin from the ideal of maternality once socially enforced.
In the case of women in Livia, and Janice/Parvati's situation, this analysis of ego function is apt. All the "family values" and the traditions of honor, loyalty, tradition that Tony sometimes uses to justify himself arte far separated from their pre-modern origins, but persist in distorted forms. Men continue to rule, but in ways that are formally illegitimate in terms of the larger society's expressed values and in terms of any traditional bourgeois legality. In short, everything we see is decadent. The women find a protected space in the traditional honoring of mothers, wives, and daughters in which they can exert manipulative control over events. I suspect their subordinate position -- unjustified by any material circumstance -- is at much of the root of their extreme but concealed rage and malevolence.
Janice Soprano/Parvati Wasatch (another instance of the confluence of decadence and new-ageyness)also shows many of her mother's qualities. I've seen only up through the middle of the second season, on cassette, and she has gravitated towards the most impulsive, frightening and unstable character, Richie Aprile, a true psychopath, with what J. Reid Meloy (in THE PSYCHOPATHIC MIND) calls the "reptilian gaze." In one of his books, Kernberg discusses "the subjective experience of emptiness" which many people address by gross risk-taking and the search for dangerous excitment. Janice reminds me of women in another of Meloy's books, VIOLENT ATTACHMENTS, a study of the female accomplices of psychopathic serial killers.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema