he went by in his writings. In 1850, Hawthorne wrote what is considered to be his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter. The novel is set in a Puritan community in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1640s. Hester Pryne is a young woman in the town that performs an act of adultery with a man unknown throughout most of the novel. She is forced to wear an ‘A’ on her breast, which is called ‘The Scarlet Letter’,
protection against snakes, wolves, insects, mice and moles (Zabozlaeva 1996: 45). Red as a symbol of shame and disgrace In Puritan New England of the 17th-18th centuries, a woman convicted of an illicit relationship had to wear clothes with the red letter "A" on it, which stands for adultery. And in areas where there are pubs, there is still a custom to hang red lanterns, which is a hint of intimacy and prostitution; that is why such places are in red light districts. The symbolism of the red color