In addition, the placement of these symbols represents the author's idea of how this mark on the symbol alters the meaning. In Laurence Perrine's work on the "Symbol and Irony", and how symbols work, he finds that author's placement of symbols is parallel with details that are to be taken symbolically and with that detail the symbol will be established in the rest of the novel. The repetitive nature of the symbol helps identify it according to these sources. Sven Birkerts deducts that symbols can be recognized by questioning the integrity of the symbol and recognizing the repetition and the deliberate placement of the symbol. Feelings are connected with symbols because they rely and associate with past experiences. Erich Fromm, author of "The Nature of Symbolic Language", and Thomas Foster, author of "How to Read Literature Like a Professor", agree that emotional feelings related to symbols are "rooted in the experience of every human being" (Fromm 123). These personal symbols rely on a person's past that are associated with different scattered past events that can be placed in groups that involve how the person feels about that symbol or object: "A symbol is any object, action, person, place, or idea that carries additional and recognizable meaning for one or more people" (Birkerts 125). The different points of a symbol that help identify it are seen in universal, conventional and accidental symbols, listed in Fomms work, and are represented in other such works such as Birkerts. However, the universal symbol is the most frequent and recognizable because of its easy association with a multitude of individual's situations. .
If the steps and concept of symbolism are then applied to the Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter, we would find a multitude of example of symbols in the characters' lives, objects and the characters themselves.
