Kristen Bell: Thank you for teaching our daughters. Here's another way to read Snow White.

Actress Kristen Bell, the voice of Anna in Disney's Frozen, has concerns about the message Snow White sends about sexual consent. She recently told Parents magazine that when she reads the story to her daughters, she raises the question: "Don't you think that it's weird that the prince kisses Snow White without her permission? Because you can not kiss someone if they're sleeping!" She defended her comments against critics on Twitter, asserting "I'm a mom who wants my girls to possess critical thinking."

First of all, I want to say 'Thank you' to Kristen Bell. Thank you in the first place for reading to your children; we need more parents who do that. Thank you even more for teaching your children critical thinking. That's a lost art as well. Thank you in addition for being willing to speak out publicly about the need to train up our daughters (and our sons) to protect and respect one another's sexuality. It's essential to our humanity to recognize that sexuality is always a gift to be given, never an object to be taken.

It's especially fitting to me that the voice of Anna should take the lead here. As I wrote in The Most Important Song in Frozen, Anna's character is an example of a girl who must learn to guard her heart against those who would seek to deceive, manipulate and abuse her. Bravo Anna, and bravo Kristen.

With that said, I would like to offer Ms. Bell (and other concerned parents) three interpretive tools that may change the way you read Snow White.

1. The Literal Reading

To begin with, on the most literal level, Snow White isn't just asleep. She's dead. Technically, within the story, she is under a spell of "living death." This spell can only be broken by true love's kiss, so the Prince is not just "getting" a kiss, he's giving her life. The literal correspondent would not be some frat boy kissing a sleeping girl at a college party; the literal correspondent in our non-magical world would be an EMT administering mouth to mouth resuscitation. Nobody argues that an EMT should have had consent before saving someone's life.

2. The Symbolic Reading

Of course, the discontinuity of this literal line of argument only makes it more obvious that interpreting a Fairy Tale like Snow White on a realistic level is missing the point entirely. Fairy Tales by their very nature signal to us that we are dealing with a world of symbols and allegory, not a direct representation of our own world.

Modern stories tend to use psychological realism even when they use elements of fantasy. Frozen is a great example of this: The internal logic of Elsa and Anna's relationships with their parents, with one another, and with men is the same as the relationships of people in our world, even if they happen to throw in some magical ice powers and talking snowmen.

In these modern stories, the typical approach to plot is to have the character go through a series of external events that lead her through an arc of internal change. Anna starts off too trusting and learns to be more cautious; Elsa starts off too self-contained and learns to be more open.

In contrast, many older stories follow a symbolic logic in which the characters do not demonstrate any internal change. Instead, they represent a constant value throughout the story. The plot progresses not by changing who they are on the inside but by revealing who they are on the outside.

For example, Snow White is always good but she starts off rejected in the forest and ends up honored in the castle. Cinderella is always beautiful inside, but starts off dressed in rags and ends up dressed as royalty. Conversely, Snow White's stepmother is always a bad person on the inside, but she starts off a beautiful queen and ends up a hideous witch.

This doesn't mean that pre-modern tale-tellers did not recognize that a person could be rich, beautiful and royal and still be a bad person on the inside, or vice versa. It simply means that they preferred to tell stories in an incarnated, embodied, symbolic way in which a character's external appearance is gradually revealed to correspond to their inner reality.

If we read Snow White holistically using this symbolic logic, it becomes evident that Snow White's character does symbolically give consent to the Prince. The whole story starts with Snow White singing over a wishing well, "I'm wishing for the one I love." Immediately the Prince appears, literally drawn by her wishing, and he falls in love with her. He joins in, singing with her over the same well, "I'm wishing for the one I love." They proceed to sing in a duet of mutual wishing.

Of course this symbolic movement is not represented by a psychologically realistic process of relational development: We never see a conversation between Snow White and the Prince. But that is because this is not that kind of storytelling. We are not privy to the inner worlds of the characters; instead we are supposed to infer their inner essence from the external symbols assigned to them, and all of these point to the idea that Snow White is an equal participant along with the Prince in seeking this relationship.

Because of their symbolic connection the Prince continues to be drawn to her until finally he finds her in her state of living death. Their kiss represents the consummation of a drawing together that was symbolically initiated by her wish for him. This is visibly confirmed after the Queen's evil spell is broken: Snow White could have slapped the Prince the moment she awoke. The fact that she embraces him immediately makes it clear that she approves and agrees with what he has done.

By the way, this symbolic reading helps to answer the other question Kristen Bell says she asks with her children when they read Snow White: "Why would someone accept food from a stranger?" On a literal level, it seems foolish for Snow White to accept the apple. But on the symbolic level, the witch promises her that this is a "wishing apple," and Snow White is driven by her wish for "the one I love." At the symbolic level, the great irony of the story is that the witch's claim turns out to be true: Through the apple, Snow White eventually ends up receiving her wish. Far from being a story about a Prince who violates consent, one could read this as a story about a Princess whose own desires are even more powerful than the grave.

3. The Allegorical Reading

Finally, it's worth noting that a story like Snow White in its original context would not be understood as ultimately about a romantic relationship at all, even though that is the symbolic form.

In a previous age when our culture was universally biblically literate (whether Disney's 1938 or the centuries earlier context of the source tale), no one could have missed the biblical allusion of a poisoned apple that leads to sleeping death as a reference to the original fall of humankind into Sin and Death when Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the Garden of Eden. As I wrote in a recent devotion about Snow White, the Prince here is a type for Jesus Christ as the bridegroom of the Church who promises rescue from the power of death by virtue of his own resurrection.

In this way Snow White participates in the long tradition of Romantic literature in which a pure longing of a lover for the beloved is used as a picture of the soul's desire for God and of God's gracious action to seek out and restore fallen humanity. The sexuality if these stories was deliberately minimized (e.g. the Prince basically giving Snow White a peck on the lips, not some kind of passionate physical embrace) because they are intended to point to the spiritual realm. (Our modern tendency to tell stories in which people are "saved" simply because they find their human "soul mate" is a dim echo of this literary tradition that has forgotten the roots from which it came.) In this kind of allegorical reading, it's simply a category error to read it as instructive for how two human beings should pursue a romantic or sexual relationship.

What about misunderstandings?

Of course it could be argued that children are not capable of grasping the symbolic and allegorical levels of interpretation and that, even if it is not intended, Snow White could lead to a misunderstanding that it's OK to engage in sexual conduct without consent.

That's why I have no problem with Kristen Bell asking her daughter's the questions that she does. Better safe than sorry.

However, in the process of teaching her children "critical thinking," I trust that as they get older, she will also ask them other questions: Symbolic questions like "what does the mirror represent in the story?" or "why are the dwarves represented as miners for hidden jewels?" Allegorical questions like "what does it mean for the human condition that the queen starts off desiring to be the most beautiful but ends up making herself the most hideous?" or "what does it say about the deepest longings of the human soul that we consistently refer to death as sleep?"

In short, I hope that Ms. Bell, her children, and all of us as readers and consumers of film, can learn to appreciate stories like Snow White on their own terms. We just might discover that, in all that we've gained in a world that can tell beautiful stories like Frozen, we might have forgotten a few things, too.