My two favorite literary genres are early American literature and modern celebrity memoirs. As luck would have it, Britney Spears happened to release her memoir when I was in the middle of teaching The Scarlet Letter.
I know, I know. This is not the first time I’ve written about Britney Spears in conversation with a classic American feminist text by a problematic author. In fact, the last time I wrote about Spears, I had COVID, and here I am with COVID again. But this time, Britney is telling her own story, I have had a steroid shot, and I’m ready to fight Jamie Spears, the ghost of his daddy, Kevin Federline, and Justin Timberlake in a Walmart parking lot.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for both The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. If you haven’t read The Scarlet Letter, it’s in the public domain as an eBook and has multiple free audio versions on YouTube, including my favorite, which you can find here. If you haven’t read The Woman in Me, you can find it where all fine books are sold. Personally, I enjoyed the Michelle Williams audiobook version, and I hope she wins a Grammy for it.
As I said the last time I talked about Britney, I fell in love with early American literature because it helps me to understand patterns in our society. The more things change, the more things stay the same. In The Scarlet Letter, we see a woman named Hester Prynne being vilified for being unchaste according to the standards of her society. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, written in 1849 and published in 1850, was historical fiction set in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1640s. Many scholars believe that Hester’s character was inspired by the brilliant transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, who, like Hester, also had a child out of wedlock in a foreign land. Fuller bucked gender norms and wrote far ahead of her time about topics such as women’s equality and gender fluidity. As one of my students said last year after reading some of her work, “She ate,” and Hawthorne seemed to agree with this sentiment. Although Hester is certainly plagued by her fair share of Puritan guilt, we see her rebelliousness in her haughtiness and how she decorates her badge of shame and the living embodiment of her sin, her daughter Pearl.
If Hester Prynne and Margaret Fuller were ahead of their time, then Britney Spears was as well. Much of her music has aged well, but society’s treatment of her during her rise to fame in the late 1990s and early 2000s certainly has not.
Although they take place centuries apart, the similarities between Hester Prynne’s story and The Woman in Me are striking. Like Spears, Hester was an artist who married young, not necessarily for love (the first time, at least, for Spears). Like Spears, throughout Hester’s entire story, people can’t stop talking about her bosom.
When Hester stands up on the scaffold, she’s criticized by the Salem gossips for her sexuality and the way she dresses. This is not dissimilar to Britney’s treatment, especially after her breakup with Justin Timberlake.
Meanwhile, the “golden boy” partner in Hester’s iniquity becomes essentially untouchable: “They fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified.” This sounds a lot like someone else who shot to fame after the fall of an ex-lover.
Dimmesdale’s internal guilt somehow makes him a more powerful minister, and all of the virgins in the church want to marry him. While I can’t speak for Timberlake’s internal guilt over his treatment of Britney Spears and his unthinkable decision to play guitar at her during one of the most physically and emotionally painful moments of her life, he did use their relationship and subsequent breakup as a springboard for his solo career, again and again and again.
Like Dimmesdale’s half-hearted defenses of Hester at various times throughout the book, Timberlake has given in to public pressure to show support for and apologize to Spears (and Janet Jackson, another woman who was publicly shamed after the infamous Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” incident while Timberlake escaped unscathed).
Now, like Dimmesdale on the scaffold at the end of The Scarlet Letter, the entire world has been exposed to Timberlake’s part in the story. Unlike Dimmesdale, who seems relieved at the revelation, Timberlake is reportedly pissed. But “What goes around…comes around,” you might say.
But enough about the ex-lovers who used these talented women as a way to achieve power and status until their well-deserved downfalls. The stories of Hester Prynne and Britney Spears are, at least in my view, victory stories. They’re stories of women reclaiming their power and their legacies.
In Chapter XIII of The Scarlet Letter, entitled “Another View of Hester,” we find Hester, seven years after her public shaming, musing about tearing down the Puritan patriarchy: “As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew.” After seven years of making amends for her sins, being called an unfit mother, and literally having the “sombre little urchins” that were the Puritan children fling mud at her and her daughter any time they went to town, Hester has had enough. She goes to her estranged husband, who has been pulling the strings since he showed up out of nowhere, and tells him to knock it off. She threatens to expose Chillingworth for privately torturing Dimmesdale, and she’s no longer concerned with the consequences of that. She begins to take control of her story at this point, and she ends up being remembered well by society.
After thirteen years of being controlled by her father in a conservatorship and repeatedly having her fitness as a mother being called into question, Spears also finds the strength to tear down the system that has been oppressing her. Jamie Spears, like Chillingworth, was largely absent for a long while and had an unhealthy obsession with owning Britney’s body and controlling who came into contact with her. Like Chillingworth, whose true identity is Roger Prynne, Jamie Spears lived a double life. He portrayed himself as a loving father while abusing and exploiting his entire family.
Britney Spears has certainly raised eyebrows as she’s attempted to find herself in her newfound freedom, but her freedom is what’s important. Hester Prynne is content to live out her days in her beach cottage on the edge of town, and Spears seems to be content as a homebody as well, at least for now. I truly wish her the best, and I’m happy that she gets to control her legacy now, whatever that may be.
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