What does Hawthorne mean when he calls the colony a utopia?

In the context of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter," the term "utopia" is not used to accurately describe the Puritan colony in Massachusetts. The colony is far from a perfect society, and in fact, it is characterized by its strict religious laws, intolerance, and hypocrisy. Hawthorne did not call the colony a utopia and would not have used this term to describe the oppressive setting in which the story unfolds.