A Shakespearean Drama

In the final act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet — a tragedy Christine Burleson taught for over four decades at ETSU — the protagonist lies sprawled on the floor of Elsinore Castle clinging to life. Just as his friend Horatio is about to commit suicide to follow him in death, Hamlet cries out: “If thou did ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity a while, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.”

I begin with this literary allusion to tell an important, nearly Shakespearean story in the history of East Tennessee State University: the life and death of a professor who taught in the English department for most of the first 40 years of the university’s existence, beginning in 1925 and continuing until her death in 1967. Like the plot of Hamlet, Burleson’s tale is allegedly fraught with unrequited love, despondent suicide, and ghostly visitations. A number of books refer to her and her alleged haunting of Burleson Hall, a building named after her father, where I have taught for 20 years.

In each version of her life and suicide, the legend always goes something like this: She was distraught over her slowly debilitating health and her thwarted love affair with T. S. Stribling, a Tennessee writer she had met in the 1920s. Following her tragic death, her ghost began to haunt Burleson Hall. On the second floor, her eyes allegedly stare out from the portrait of her father. She supposedly groans and shrieks when in pain, and there have been reports of her apparition floating through the halls.

What these tales fail to note is that she was the first woman to receive the ETSU Distinguished Faculty Award and that she also published numerous articles, as well as a series of English textbooks, some with her father.

Her star-crossed story gained more currency when a local writer and her psychologist husband penned a play about her in 1988 called Cancell’d Destiny, the title borrowed from Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.

In the 20 years following her death, there is no record of ghost stories or incidents related to Burleson. That changed in 1988. A couple who had moved to Johnson City in 1983 rented and later purchased the home where Burleson ended her life. They discovered that Christine had committed suicide in the upstairs bathroom. Pat Arnow, a writer, and her husband, Steve Giles, who worked at the VA hospital near ETSU, decided to conduct a “psychological autopsy” of Burleson’s death. With help from local actors, Arnow composed the one-woman, one-act play Cancell’d Destiny, much of it based on a passionate exchange of letters between Burleson and Stribling.

While the motives of the three writers were worthy, the resulting drama produced unintended consequences. Word spread about the jilting lover, the numerous novel rejection slips Burleson had received, and the determined suicide.

But how does Stribling’s literary achievement relate to the real story? First, the female protagonist in Stribling’s Bright Metal, originally titled “Agatha Goes South” (1928), was at least loosely based on Christine. He even calls her “Christatha” at one point. The novel tells the story of an educated and sophisticated woman who marries a Tennessee farmer and attempts to reform him and turn the local populace away from the “subjection of women, rampant political corruption, and religious backwardness.”

While the effect on Christine from the praise of this fairly famous writer, 18 years her senior, was palpable, she also influenced him. Not only did she provide a prototype for the novel’s protagonist, she was instrumental in the revision of the novel’s title. She had been encouraging Stribling to read Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, and his revised title comes from that play.

Burleson assigned Stribling’s work to her students, and she continued to champion his writing while critiquing it in her letters. Her role as his correspondent and personal “editor” partly shaped Stribling’s later fiction and may have even helped him win the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. The two struck up a profound relationship, writing hundreds of letters to one another from the mid-1920s through the early part of 1931, continuing even after Tom had married Louella Kloss in 1930.

Christine accepted the news with grace and dignity, although obviously with hurt feelings, and even said she hoped to meet the new bride. From this point forward, Christine began to focus more on her own career. Her relationship with Stribling did not, as the legend and play suggest, stunt her growth.

Burleson succeeded as a scholar and teacher for the next 37 years after her breakup with Stribling. During those four decades, she studied Italian in Italy, receiving a certificate from the University of Siena in 1932. She

published numerous essays and, with her father, a series of textbooks. And she served as Dean of Women and Professor of English at Bethany College in West Virginia. After returning to Johnson City in 1936 to care for her ailing father, she was invited to play in the newly formed orchestra. She was elected President of the Ladies Auxiliary. She attended and participated in Shakespeare summer festivals in Antioch, Ohio, and Stratford, Ontario. And she taught thousands of graduate and undergraduate students. Her skills as a Shakespearean critic reveal themselves in a letter from late 1930 focusing on her recent study of Hamlet. She confesses that “it catches me anew every time I read it.” Her summary of the philosophical contradictions in the play are particularly insightful:

There is nothing else that lays the soul and mind of man bare so genuinely as [Hamlet]. One great tragic experience – and a world created through it, without bathos and flim-flam. Essentially a masculine experience, yet universalized to fit any human being of any sex or condition. The following month she ventured from Oxford to London to see John Gielgud’s lead performance in Antony and Cleopatra. She notes first that she “enjoyed [the performance] from several new angles,” including the fact that the “beautifully spoken” dialogue “yielded more poetry than when read.” But she thought Gielgud had too “fleshly [a] physique for Antony, not at all Herculean as Plutarch depicts him.” Many critics, and Gielgud himself, believed he was “miscast” in the role. Burleson’s own attempts at novel writing were not successful. According to one rejection letter, the writing is “impersonal” and “abstract.” But the letter did give her advice she took to heart: “stick with what you know rather than what you read.” Perhaps as a means of compensating for the rejection letters, she threw herself even more energetically into her teaching for the next 15 years. Colleagues commented about her love of teaching and her efforts to make her classroom more than just a sterile learning environment. Several noted how she would pick fresh flowers from her garden and bring them to her classroom. In the 1950s, her plan of self-improvement became even more focused on Shakespeare. In one memo in her private papers, she noted that Dean Beasley had made “clear the college’s urging of us to improve ourselves.” She therefore offered a “five-year plan of attendance upon [sic] Shakespeare Festivals, largely at Antioch in Ohio, where all of the Bard’s plays have now been produced.” Her syllabi show she led classes on Shakespearean romances, Shakespeare’s histories, and, most often, Shakespeare’s tragedies. The only M.A. thesis she directed and saved in her collected papers was titled “Some Functional Uses of Puns in Hamlet” (1957), which shows her ability to focus on humor even in tragic situations. Her final exams for the Shakespeare courses were extremely rigorous, asking questions on every aspect of the plays – from versification, to sources, to themes. One of the most prominent points in this final act of Burleson’s life is that her engagement with Shakespeare and Renaissance literature may have contributed to her decision to commit suicide. Although Renaissance views of such deaths were complicated, many scholars believed that “death before dishonor” was an acceptable solution for ending one’s life. A number of them also pointed back to Seneca — father of revenge tragedy and Shakespeare’s model for plays such as Titus Andronicus and Hamlet — and his death

by self-inflicted wounds as a perfect example of such dignified demise. In the early 1950s, the health of Burleson’s father began to fail. After serving as his caretaker for many years, Christine committed him to Takoma Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Greeneville, Tennessee. He had been suffering from what was most Burleson Hall, named after Christine’s father, David, is home to ETSU’s likely Parkinson’s Disease. Department of Literature and Language. | Photo by Ron Campbell Christine, time and again, told her closest associates, “I will never let someone have to treat me the last days of my life if I become an invalid.” By the fall of 1967, she was confined to a wheelchair and could not accept the thought of depending on others to care for her. Early in the morning of November 1, she disconnected the intercom system she had installed to communicate with her next-door neighbor. She then covered herself in a dry-cleaning bag, put a gun to her head, and attempted to fire it. After the gun failed to discharge, her second shot ended her life. Earlier that fall, in accepting the ETSU Distinguished Faculty Award, she had said: “. . . our profession is one of maximum challenge and opportunity. No other could provide anyone with more opportunities for personal growth and enrichment. Every period spent in a classroom has given me a sense of exhilaration, of enjoying human fellowship, and of getting inspiration from the finest possible sources. Furthermore, nowhere in the world could one enjoy better associations than with a group of teachers.” Dr. Robert Sawyer teaches in the Department of Literature and Language at ETSU. Author’s note: I want to express my gratitude to the ETSU Huffman Foundation for the grant that allowed me to conduct this research. I thank Jeremy Smith in the Archives of Appalachia, as well as Fred Sauceman, Tom Burton, and Bridget Garland. And I am grateful to Danielle Byington, for her help in researching Stribling’s letters at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.