I just realized that the morons who claim Mr. Price (the heroine’s biological father in Mansfield Park(1)) is some kind of daughter molesting pervert got the idea from the 1999 film, and now I’m angry at that bleep of a filmmaker all over again.

Just remember people, if you go around claiming Price is an incestuous pervert, and Sir Thomas is indisputably a large-scale, highly sadistic slaveholder(2) you are doing the same thing as the people who think Darcy’s uncle is the Earl of Matlock and Lizzy’s mother is named Fanny, and those blankity-blanks who think that Elrond is a bitter, bullying hater of mortals and Saruman is Extra Strength Dracula and Gandalf is Dumbledore and Denethor is a gluttonous slob. You are confusing the adaptations, however good or interesting they are, with the source material.

(1)In the book, Price is a drunken, lazy and uncouth man who makes occasional “coarse” (according to raised-by-posh-wolves Fanny) remarks about Fanny’s looks and potential boyfriends, of which the only comment actually quoted to the reader sounds like something Mrs. Jennings from Sense and Sensibility would say. Not a good guy but pretty inoffensive compared to the likes of General Tilney from Northanger Abbey.

(2)Sir Thomas’ Antigua holdings mean that he’s implicated in a slave-based economy to at least some extent, but there were in fact properties in that part of the world – lumber plantations for instance – which used paid freemen for labor rather than slaves. There’s absolutely nothing in the book to indicate which kind of labor his Antigua property runs on, and some indications – abolitionist-reading Edmund’s framing of the offscene conversation between abolitionist-reading Fanny and Sir Thomas about the slave trade – which make it seem like Sir Thomas is not necessarily all that comfortable with slavery. It’s not objectively wrong to make Sir Thomas an evil slave-torturing so-and-so in adaptation. But nothing makes it an inherently superior interpretation of the book, or even an interpretation of the book more soothing to modern consciences, than the alternatives. The book says so little about his activities in Antibes that you could just as easily imagine him as being repelled by the horrors of slavery when he sees them up close, and then spending all that time in Antibes trying to manumit slaves from his hypothetical sugar plantation or trying to divest himself of his hypothetical lumber plantation because even though he’s not using slaves himself, he can’t bear to do business with the slave-owners.