I chose to focus this optional journal on metal, one of the motifs Morrison uses throughout the text of Beloved. Morrison uses this common substance, metal, to illustrate her themes involving slavery and emotional repression. If you think about metal and the images that it can bring to mind, you begin to see Morrison's intent. Metal is a basic element with an abundance of characteristics that add to the emotional might of its symbolism. Metal can restrain and stifle; it is at once strong and unbreakable; its very color evokes winter themes-dreary, chilly, gray, and dark. Morrison wants readers to subtly evoke these images each time they read a word or sentence that includes some form of metal. Morrison takes particular care in surrounding the character of Paul D with this form of imagery.
             Through Morrison, we learn that Paul D's heart is a tobacco tin. Morrison details the "lid rusted shut" showing the bottling up of Paul Ds emotions. "By the time he got to 124 nothing could pry it open. "
             Morrison uses tin to describe Paul D's heart which has become a sort of metal vault, where he keeps all that he does not wish to think about We learn, too, through this imagery, that this form of repression takes work. "It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper, one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest"
             If we think about Morrison's choice of metal for Paul's heart, tin, perhaps this was carefully selected. Tin suggests a metal that is cold and rigid, but not inflexible. So from the beginning, readers are subtly aware that there is hope for Paul D's heart; but the hope doesn't come from a likely source (although, nothing Morrison does is predictable). "He said it, but she did not go. She moved closer with a footfall he didn't hear and
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