Summary—Chapter I: The Prison Door This first chapter contains little in the way of action, instead setting the scene and introducing the first of many symbols that will come to dominate the story. A crowd of dark, gloomy-looking people have gathered outside a prison door in seventeenth-century Boston. The building's heavy oak door is studded with iron spikes, and the prison appears to have been built to hold dangerous criminals. No matter how optimistic the founders of new colonies may be, the narrator tells us, they invariably provide a prison and a cemetery almost immediately. This is also true for the citizens of Boston, who built their prison about twenty years earlier. The only inconsistency in an otherwise dreary scene is the rose bush growing next to the prison door. The narrator suggests that it offers a reminder of Nature's kindness to the condemned; for his tale, he says, will provide either a "sweet moral blossoming" or some relief in the face of unrelenting pain and sadness. Summary - Chapter II: The Market Square As the crowd watches, Hester Prynne, a young woman holding a little girl, walks out the prison door and toward a scaffold (a raised platform), where she will be publicly condemned. The women in the crowd make derogatory comments about Hester; they particularly criticize her for the badge ornament embroidered on her chest: a letter "A" stitched in gold and scarlet. From the women's conversation and Hester's memories as she walks through the crowd, we can deduce that she has committed adultery and given birth to an illegitimate child, and that the "A" on her dress stands for "adulteress." The children tease her and the adults stare at her. Scenes from Hester's earlier life flash through her mind: she sees her parents standing outside their house in rural England, then she sees a "deformed" scholar, much older than her, whom she married and followed to continental Europe. But now the present floods her and she inadvertently holds the child in her arms, making him cry. She regards her current fate in disbelief. Analysis - Chapters I-II These chapters introduce the reader to Hester Prynne and begin to explore the theme of sin, along with its connection to knowledge and social order. The use of symbols in the chapters, as well as their representation of the political reality of Hester Prynne's world, testify to the contradictions inherent in Puritan society.