The Scarlet Letter is the story about how life in a Puritan society can be very difficult. The Puritan society in Boston was a moralistic and gloomy place where the citizens dressed in drab colors and lacked any liveliness. Hawthorne gave symbolic meanings to the colors that he employed in the novel. The prominent colors that stood out throughout the novel include red, black, brown, white, and gray.

The first chapter contained little in the way of action; instead it set the scene and introduced the first of many symbols that will come to dominate the story. A crowd of somber, dreary-looking people has gathered outside the door of a prison in seventeenth-century Boston. The crowd was dressed in "sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats." This color of gray represented what was in between the extreme and the clearness of things. This society was a world that had...