Critically  analyze the title of Alice Walker's In Search of our Mother's Garden .

For Walker, the search for self-esteem is a quest for an ideal sense of self. If the culture was perfect, what might her experience of self have been like? The question is a religious question, so In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is an invocation of an archetypal motif. She is invoking the theme of paradise, to examine what an ideal sense of self might have felt like, as if she were raised by her mother in paradise, instead of in the broken culture of her youth in America.