In what ways are Madame Bovary and As I Lay Dying similar and different?

The female protagonists in both Madame Bovary and As I lay Dying are similar in the sense that both were women who were deeply unhappy in their marriages.

In Madame Bovary, Emma finds that marriage is a suffocating experience. Her country-doctor husband, Charles, is infatuated with his beautiful wife, but Emma finds his unsophisticated affection annoying. Somehow, married life fails to meet her expectations, and she finds it difficult to reconcile the 'felicity, passion, and rapture' found within the pages of a romance novel with her seemingly monotonous existence. The subsequent birth of her daughter, Berthe, fails to rouse her emotional lethargy. In due time, she has affairs with two men, Leon and Rodolphe, who both disappoint her. In As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren, the matriarch of an impoverished Southern family, is unhappily married to Anse. One of her five children, Jewel, is the product of her love affair with the Reverend Whitfield. As the novel begins, Addie is dying. In the two stories, both heroines sought comfort in extra-marital affairs, but the results were less than satisfying to both.

As we compare both stories, we discover that Addie and Emma were indifferent to their husbands while they lived.Yet, although both Emma and Addie die in their respective stories, Emma's death is the result of suicide. She poisons herself after her last meeting with Rodolphe fails to produce the three thousand francs she needs to save her family from financial ruin; Emma dies in horrible pain, despairing of all hope. Meanwhile, Addie dies in a paradoxical spirit of penitence and defiance. By all accounts, she resigns herself to the judgment of God for her sins, but remains stubborn in reference to Jewel, the product of her adulterous affair. In fact, Cora Tull, Addie's neighbor is incensed when she realizes that Addie regards Jewel as her salvation

He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from, the water and from the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he will save me.

So, while Emma in Madame Bovary forged no lasting affection with her legitimate daughter, Berthe, Addie in As I Lay Dying viewed her illegitimate offspring as the only good product from a sinful dalliance. In fact, Addie's words are prescient. Jewel does 'save' his mother by retrieving her coffin from the river, and later, by dragging her coffin out of Gillespie's burning barn.

Other differences include the setting of both stories. Madame Bovary was set in Southern France in the 19th Century, while As I Lay Dying was set in the southern United States in the 20th Century.

In Madame Bovary, Emma's husband, Charles, loved his wife to distraction, even after her death.

Everyone, he thought, had adored her. Every man, of course, had wanted her. It made her seem even more beautiful; and it engendered in him a harsh perpetual desire, inflaming his despair, a desire that had no limits because it could never now be realized.

Sadly for him, Charles discovers love letters from Leon and Rodolphe to his wife after her death. Devastated, he takes to the bottle, and subsequently dies of a broken heart. On the other hand, Anse doesn't seem especially affected by the death of his wife, Addie. At the end of the story, he proudly introduces his children to his love, the new Mrs. Bundren.

Hope this helps!