Troy’s pocket watch

Troy’s pocket watch turns a personal possession into a material reminder of the bond between Troy and Fanny Robin. Returned to Bathsheba with Troy’s other belongings after he is presumed drowned, it holds the pale coil of Fanny’s hair that Bathsheba recognizes as the source of the upheaval in her life; faced with the object alone, she chooses remembrance over destruction.

The Watch and the Lock of Hair

Bathsheba takes the watch into her hand beside a small fire late in the evening, after the newspaper account of Troy’s apparent drowning and the arrival of his clothes have shaken her conviction that he is still alive. She opens its case as Troy had opened it before her a week earlier. Inside is the little coil of pale hair: an intimate keepsake whose presence links the watch to Fanny and to the events that have transformed Bathsheba’s understanding of her marriage.

The watch is therefore more than one item among the returned belongings. Its case preserves evidence of a relationship that Bathsheba had once experienced through jealousy and that she must now consider in the wake of Troy’s presumed death. The hair had been, in her words, the fuse to the great explosion. Held inside the watch, it makes a hidden past physically present at the very moment when Bathsheba is trying to decide what Troy’s absence means.

Bathsheba’s Choice

Bathsheba interprets the lock as a sign that Troy and Fanny belonged to one another and imagines them gone together. In that painful formulation, she casts herself as belonging to neither of them. The object prompts not an abstract judgment but a direct confrontation with the emotional consequence of their attachment: the watch has come back to her, but its most affecting contents recall a bond that excludes her.

She begins to hold the hair over the fire, considering its destruction, then snatches her hand back. Rather than burn it, she resolves to keep it in memory of Fanny. The gesture changes the watch’s immediate meaning: what could have been treated as a painful relic to erase becomes a keepsake Bathsheba deliberately preserves. Her pity for Fanny, expressed in that decision, replaces the jealousy that had shaped her earlier view of the other woman.

Narrative Significance

The watch concentrates a larger reversal into a small, tangible object. During Troy’s absence, Bathsheba struggles to accept that he may be dead; the returned clothes and eyewitness report make that possibility harder to resist, but the watch does not settle whether he is alive. Instead, it redirects her attention from speculation about Troy’s fate to the history contained in his belongings. Its enclosed lock of hair brings the past into the present without resolving the uncertainty surrounding him.

The object also gives physical form to Bathsheba’s change in feeling toward Fanny. The hair that once helped ignite jealousy is now spared from the flames and retained as a memorial. That choice does not undo the suffering associated with the watch, but it marks a turn from rivalry toward compassion: Bathsheba cannot claim a place in the bond she recognizes between Troy and Fanny, yet she can choose how to treat the relic that represents it.