The Author as Creator in Frankenstein Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be read as an allegory of the creative act of fatherhood. Victor Frankenstein, the 'modern Prometheus' tries to achieve knowledge of the Gods, to enter the sphere of the creator rather than the created. Like the Author, he also apes the supreme creative act; transgresses in an attempt to enter the female arena of childbirth. Divine creation myths are themselves part of the historical process that seeks to dethrone the feminine; this is the history of Art, itself initially denied to women as an outlet for self-expression. It is a process recorded in Art itself, in stories like that of Prometheus. Prometheus in previous myths stole fire from the Gods (analogous to the author in his art). He was later credited not only as man's benefactor but as his creator. Man creates God through myth to have will power towards. At this point text, analogy and reality intertwine. As Victor moves into the feminine space of the womb, an act of creation aped by the Gods in mythology and religion, Mary Shelley as an author moves into the masculine domain of art, aping the creative power of the Gods. Reading Frankenstein as an analogy of Art may be more fruitful if done within the framework of Oscar Wilde's essay, 'The Decay of Lies', in which the author argues that the artist creates the world and does not merely imitate it : This will conclude this essay. At the meal between mortals and the gods of Mecone, Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting the bones instead of the choicest viscera. Man was punished by the denial of fire; Prometheus again defied the gods by stealing it. As punishment, he was chained to a sheet of paper... In the transition from story to film, "Frankenstein" was often mistakenly used to refer to the monster. This transition itself reflects the process of progression and replacement. As with the non-existent stag hunter that Conan-Doyle never wrote about, celluloid depictions have come to denote the essence, presumably, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Works CitedMarch, Jenny. "Prometheus." The Cassell Dictionary of Classical Mythology. London: Cassell, 1998.Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: or the modern Prometheus. 1818. Ed. James Reiger. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1982.Waxman, Barbara Fry. "The Tragedy of the Promethean Overreacher as a Woman." Papers on Language and Literature 23 1 (1987): 14-26.Wilde, Oscar. "The decay of the lie." Oscar Wilde. Ed. Isobel Murray. The Oxford Authors. Oxford: OUP, 1989.