“Untitled, Unfinished”: Geological Inscription and Ecofeminist Refusal in Don DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding

This essay presents an ecocritical reading of Don DeLillo’s play Love-Lies-Bleeding , in which the settler colonial legacy of post–World War II land art comes under scrutiny from an ecofeminism that seeks to reclaim an environmental ethics of embodiment. DeLillo’s patriarch, the artist Alex Macklin, excavates a hollow in the desert mountains where he plans to house several paintings—a self-aggrandizing practice of masculine geological inscription. Combating this practice, Alex’s wives and even the planet itself mount a refusal of Alex’s aesthetic project in favor of an ecological expansiveness. The play complements this conceptual antagonism through a formal tension between the unbounded space of geographical landscape and the bounded space of the stage.