Counter argument to Weissman's essay

In Cheryl Anne Weissman’s essay she basis her entire argument on a passage found in page 160 where she proclaims that a conflict between renewing the past violates the present when regarding Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth’s relationship. I, however, beg to differ. Not only is Weissman’s lack of analyzing the poem contribute to the misrepresentation she is sending to her audience, but never does she mention the narrator while analyzing the certain passage she focuses on. The narrator is the key part in the novel because it’s through the narrator’s eyes that the story is being told and through that paragraph no free indirect discourse is used so it is evident that the narrator is the one actually telling the story.        

The passage with all the attention goes as follows: “ They returned into the past, more exquisitely happy perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character...(160).”  The past versus the present does create conflict in the story but it does not ultimately ruin the ending, nor does it disrupt it either. The narrator in Persuasion takes the reader into the past as a reminisce of what Anne and Wentworth’s future will ultimately behold. Doing so, brings nostalgia for the past as Anne and Wentworth yearn for the years they spent apart to be given back, thus why they reminisce on it throughout the passage. Regretting all of those years that they spent in estrangement from one another will be made up in the preceding years as they are now set to marry. With that thought in mind the ending in not disrupted nor does it disappoint like Weissman claims it does. Instead the reader is taken into the felicity of Anne and Wentworth’s love for one another and the same is to say when they marry. As the narrator bring the audience into the past, never does it violate the present of Anne and Wentworth’s relationship and feeling that they hold for one another and the audience is left satisfied not disappointed as Weissman falsely claims in her essay.