4.	
THE SCARLET LETTER 
Chapter 1: The Prison Door 
1.	What impression comes to mind when you think of a prison door? 
2.	What is a "throng"? 
3.	What feeling does paragraph 1 give you with its description of the men and 
women? 
5.	Why would garments be "sad-colored"? 
6.	What is the effect of describing hats as "steeple-crowned"? 
7.	What impression does the door give you with its heavy timbers and iron spikes? 
8.	Why would Hawthorne want to start THE SCARLET LEITER with this paragraph? 
9.	What is a Utopia? 
10.	Hawthorne writes that new towns need two public places: a cemetery and prison. 
Why? 
10.	A sepulchre is a religious tomb. What conclusions can we draw about a town that 
	has a "nucleus of sepulchres"? 	 
11.	How do these conclusions relate to the description of the people in the first 
paragraph? 
12.	How has the prison door changed in appearance since the town was founded? 
13.	Why has the prison door "never known a youthful era"? 
14.	What kind of vegetation grows in the grass in front of the prison door, and why does Hawthorne choose "unsightly” vegetation to include here? 
15.	Irony means that what happens is the opposite of what you expect. In what ways is it ironic that anything grows at all in front of the prison, and that a plant "found something congenial in the soil"? 
16.	Why does the author use a pleasant word "flower," combined with a negative adjective, "black," to describe the prison? 
17.	Where is there a turning point in paragraph 2, and why is it a turning point for you? 
18.	The author includes a real flower, a wild rosebush, in his description. What is the 
	effect of this image? 	. 
20.	What is the function of Nature in this paragraph? 
21.	What does a rose symbolize? 
22.	Ann Hutchison was a religious leader in 17th-century America who attacked popular religious practices and preached for a simpler and purer religion without ministers or buildings. She was tried and banished in 1637. What is implied by suggesting that a rose might have sprung up under her footsteps? 
23.	Why does the author choose to "pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader"? 
24.	What is the tone of this opening chapter?