Whose House, Whose Decline? Property and Family Memory in Buddenbrooks and Cevdet Bey and His Sons

Family novels are often read as if the fate of a house told the fate of a family, and a home’s sale or rebuilding becomes evidence of a lineage’s decline. This article is a comparative study of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Orhan Pamuk’s Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons), two novels in which a house changes hands, and it asks what such readings leave out. Previous comparisons have read the two houses as signs of a single family fortune, a gap the article addresses. Combining close reading with Bourdieu’s account of the family as a collective body and a field of unequal interests, and with Hall’s approach to representation, it examines the house transactions, the domestic disputes that follow them, and the later narration of earlier ownership. In both novels the economic outcome of a transaction, the losses it imposes on particular members, and the way the house’s past is later told come apart. A buyer’s gain coexists with one member’s loss of security, a firm’s continuity with the end of a shared household, and a building’s survival with a family that no longer speaks of those who built and sold it. The article proposes a way of reading family narratives that keeps economic continuity, unequal losses, and the selective transmission of the past distinct.