The Christian way of shaping, naming, and norming the feminine cannot but take into account the materials provided by the myths, cults and narratives surrounding the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Marina Warner's monography Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (first ed. 1976), is still a key reading on the topic, even if outdated in some respects. The aim of the paper is to outline a framework for discussion by reconstructing a model of the feminine as articulated through representations of Mary's sufferings over the course of history. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's theory on the lack of ontological status of the Feminine in Western thought and culture, while also incorporating Judith Butler's critiques of Irigaray, the paper explores historically the absence of a defined ontological status for femaleness in relation to Mary, particularly focusing on her intermediary pain and weeping. The ways in which Mary was depicted, narrated or venerated, either as suffering or as stoically impassive, during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period reveal strategies for shaping the feminine, conceived as the negation of the being-male or an ontological marginality of her sufferings. The paper, functioning as an introduction, or prolegomena, to a more extensive study, considers modern scholarship on the cultural and discursive aspects of pain in historical sources, showing how representations of suffering can serve as a hermeneutical tool for analyzing the construction of the feminine through the religious symbol of the Virgin Mary.