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Gerry
Skeleton in the closet.
This refers to having something in your past that is shameful and is to remain hidden. Such ‘skeletons’ could perhaps ruin a person or damage their social standing. To some extent we see a parallel in the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ that describes some well-documented cases where an aristocratic family member was perhaps insane or mentally infirm and was hidden away in the attic of the stately homes, never to emerge. You didn’t need to be mad however and Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre, sees Rochester’s wife kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband.
So the definition reduces to having a hidden scandal or infamy that is to be kept from public knowledge. We all have skeletons of one sort or another that we prefer to keep quiet and the expression is a useful shorthand for this rewriting of a person’s history or back-story.
Sources for this expression are many and various ranging from the days of the body-snatchers–famously Burke and Hare who would dig up fresh graves and sell the bodies to medical students. It was alleged that students obviously didn’t want the bodies in public view so they took to hiding them in cupboards when not being dissected.
Usage of this phrase first appears in the 19th Century and is cited in numerous novels, documents and reports so its first use is lost in time, however it can possibly be sheeted home to William Stowell who used the phrase in the 1816 Eclectic Review to discuss the shame of a disease that was infectious or hereditary. The shame of passing on a hereditary disease became the “skeleton’ in the closet” for many families.
Do we all have such skeletons? Yes, we probably do. From small embarrassments to hidden scandals, the one-night stand or simply something in our past we’d rather remain hidden. No-one goes through life completely perfect (I think they’d be very boring if they did) and it is such skeletons, however trite, that the media gleefully drags out to embarrass a public figure.
Personally, I suggest such skeletons add a certain lustre to an individual, add to their character and are part of all of us.
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