cuckoldom

She claims the dance symbolizes the forgetting of one's cuckoldom, an act of oblivion echoing the political one, as a triumph for the cuckolds, not for Horner: "The triumph of the cuckolds marks a new phase in English history: embracing one's inner cuckold celebrates--albeit in overtly cynical ways--a nation recovering from a leveling rebellion that it must, with the help of repeated performances of The Country Wife, Marriage a la Mode, and other sex comedies, remember to forget." (4) The dance here becomes an ideal, though an "overtly cynical" one.

Slop's sordid pun on the "curtins and horn-works" that Uncle Toby innocently mistakes as referring to his favorite hobby of military fortification, but which the doctor intends to mean "bed-curtains" and "the horn works of cuckoldom" (89-90).