Not many classes have reading lists that include the works of breathing guru Dr. Lamaze.

But when Margaret Bruzelius created the syllabus for Mather 117: "Narratives of Motherhood," she used his works, among many others, to offer her students an eclectic view of motherhood.

"I wanted to treat the representations of motherhood as an intellectual problem," she says, "a way in which it's often not treated."

The class of seven women and three men opened its discussion this Wednesday with a quote from the Bible.

Sitting one seat from the end, Bruzelius shuffled through her notes and read a verse from Genesis: "In sorrow though shall bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

The class groaned.

Bruzelius, a lecturer on literature, laughed before pushing the class to consider its response.

"Should women suffer in child-birth?" she asked. "Is this natural?"

In a seminar focusing on the biological, cultural, social and political aspects of motherhood, a central question concerns what is natural verses what is unnatural.

"Everyone in this class will come up against ideas of what is natural," Bruzelius says. "They will be ambushed by very emotional rhetoric."

But many students say they took the class for precisely that--its challenge to cultural and biological assumptions.

Holly C. Lynch '97 says she took the class because she is curious to learn to what degree "what we see in our own mothers is culturally constructed."

On the other hand, some women in the class enrolled in the seminar for more obvious reasons.

"I had a classic reason," says Erika D. Vie-Carpenter '96. "I am going to be a mother."

Moreover, the students say they adore Bruzelius, who carefully steers, not dictates, the seminar and does so with passion.