This study investigates the mother-daughter relationship in Li Ang's novella, The Butcher's Wife, a work which is greatly associated with the story of the western Persephone myth. In a parallel pattern, both stories deal with the mother-daughter dyad, the abused and vulnerable female, the intrusive and destructive force of the male, and the scenes of the Underworld. Like the myth of Persephone, symbolizing male violence, The Butcher's Wife magnifies the necessity of feminine power constituted by the preoedipal fusion of the mother and the daughter. To Li Ang, the connection of mother and daughter is revealed through her narrative pattern of repetition and parallelism, indicating the cyclical structure of matriarchal culture. Significantly, the heroine's final killing of her husband, a representation of male violence, is performed out of a desire to retain the maternal virginity and the sense of wholeness. The killing is a metaphorical discourse of revenge, a discourse of male castration, the discourse of the reversal of the speaking subject moving from the male to the female, from the father/husband to the mother/daughter narrative.