Scarlet letter Chapter 20 help?

Question

Dimmesdale returns home from the forest ot the settlement. As we watch him go, we are struck by the change in the man. The minister who went to the woods was weak to the point of death. The minister who returns is nothing short of frenzied. In fact, he seems a little crazy.

Dimmesdale's journey home is a progress fraught with peril, for at every step, he is tempted to do some outrageous thing or another.

What does he feel like teaching to the children he sees in town?

What is he tempted to tell the newly "won-over" virgin?

When Dimmesdale gets home, he lies to Chillingworth. What is this lie?

The minister also does something else, something that points in a different direction in his life. What does he do that evening to show that he is changed?

Answer 1

It is amazing what love can do, and this has invigorated Dimmesdale who now has a new purpose in life. The spiritual battle that he has fought melts away and he feels a new freedom from the bonds of Puritanical life.

There is an interesting conversation between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, which is full of irony. Chillingworth remarks that Dimmesdale's congregation may find their ill Pastor gone the next year, and Dimmesdale responds, "Yea, to another world." The two mean different destinations, one being hell and the other being Europe.


jane

Answer 2

Analysis—Chapters XIX–XX
"Hester and Dimmesdale’s encounter serves to further complicate what is already a morally ambiguous situation. The sun shines on the couple when Hester removes the scarlet letter, suggesting that nature, God, or both favor their plan. Pearl, on the contrary, cannot accept this new, happier version of her mother. When she forces Hester to reattach the letter to her breast, Hester’s beauty immediately dissolves, “like fading sunshine,” making it seem as if Pearl is wrong to make her mother reassume her old identity. But the reader has already learned to associate Pearl with a special sort of insight, and thus it does not seem likely that Pearl errs here. Indeed, once Pearl rejoins her parents, it becomes apparent that she is right to be skeptical. She asks Dimmesdale to publicly acknowledge his relationship to her, and he refuses.
When added to the fact that the couple plans to flee to Europe, Pearl’s instinctual displeasure with the changes that have taken place in the forest suggests that Hester and Dimmesdale are not operating according to a newer, better moral code but are instead trying to find new ways to defy the same old social rules. The Puritans fled Europe out of the desire to live in a place where they would not need to hide their religious affiliations or fear the sanctions of others. Within the novel, they simply seem to have re-created the old order in the new world. Likewise, Hester and Dimmesdale are failing in their attempt to follow a higher truth. The most damning evidence of this is the fact that Dimmesdale is pleased that he will be able to stay in Boston long enough to preach the sermon for Election Day, a holiday that celebrates the forces that have tried to destroy the former lovers. Seemingly without irony, he finds it the appropriate conclusion to his career. The struggle between individual identity and social identity remains an important theme.

The thematic connection of sin with alienation and knowledge continues in these chapters. Dimmesdale returns to the village with a changed perspective. His experience in the wilderness has led him to question every aspect of his existence, and all of his usual behaviors are reversed. Dimmesdale walks a fine line between revelation and knowledge on the one hand, and destruction and evil on the other. His devilish impulses—to say that the human soul is mortal and that oaths and curses are the best response to a cruel world—might be revelations. They could also be insidious lies that will lead to his damnation.
When Dimmesdale ignores the young woman whom he encounters on the street, he clings to the values he ought, according to his newfound beliefs, to reject. Had he spoken to the young woman, he could have offered her a more realistic version of human experience. Instead, he allows her to remain part of a system he has come to accept as corrupt, because he still lazily believes that the church offers her a way to salvation. Moreover, Dimmesdale worries that encountering her now, after his time in the woods, would somehow contaminate her, but what he fails to acknowledge fully is that the contamination has already occurred. The text makes clear that he has used the young woman’s sexual attraction to him to win her over to the church."

Answer 3

you didn't even try to make it look your not trying to get someone to do your homework.