Madame Bovary

The "Madame Bovary" cover portrays the gap between Emma’s fantasy of a romantic life filled with ecstasy, which she attempts to create and sustain at all costs, and the brutal reality of death and destruction that she faces. The silhouette of a woman in a dress, projected onto the wall as light, symbolizes the luxurious and fanciful lifestyle Emma yearns for: luminous, warm, and glorious, yet merely a blurry shape of light without concrete form. What is tangible, by contrast, is the glass jar and spilled powder on the floor, which represent the arsenic Emma uses to end her life.