The truthful answer to your question is "no one really knows."
Apart from some extremely modern tropes that couldn't possibly have existed before, say, 150 years ago, it's very rare that you can find a definitive "first" instance of a trope. The best you might be able to find is the "earliest known incidence" of a trope, but considering so many works from the past are now lost forever, there's no real way to be sure that what you find is the true earliest use of a trope.
Speaking to your question, though, I think it's so specific that I don't think you'll be able to find an answer without a lot of research, and most likely not even then.
That said, in ancient times the equivalent of "brainwashing" would have been "controlled by a spell" or "demonic possession" or the like. Not exactly the same thing, but analogous for these purposes.
Edited by HeavyMetalHermitCrab on Aug 30th 2020 at 1:45:53 AM
This is true. I guess I was thinking about this trope & it occurred to me that it probably couldn't have existed prior to the type of narrative introduced by the modern novel & I wanted test that hypothesis. Asking if anyone had heard of examples prior to 1605 was one way to do that.
Interesting post. Reminds me how I should add an example from the first season of Agent Carter about a character resisting magic hypnosis via earplugs.
Tangentially, that reminded me of a Georges Feydeaux farce, Le Système Ribadier, from 1892. I forget all the details from when I read it, but basically, there's a husband who hypnotises his wife so he can go out and cheat. She learns about it, because the husband brags to a friend of his, who has a crush on her.
According to Wikipedia, at one point, when the other guy is wooing her, she pretends to be in a hypnotic sleep to aid his escape. And later on (I kind of remembered this part), after she learns to resist the hypnosis, she pretends to be hypnotized and makes her husband jealous by telling him she's visited by a lover every time she's in a trance.
I know that there was a kind of craze about hypnosis/"mesmerism" during a lot of the 19th and into the 20th century and the idea that it could be used to make someone act very out of character/commit crimes. So, I would guess there must be at least one other 19th-century work that also has someone finding a way to resist (magically effective) hypnosis.
Incidentally, I was previously reminded of Feydeaux's play years after I learned of a a sensational 1892 French murder case
in which one of the parties received a more lenient sentence after successfully convincing the jury that the other perpetrator had made her commit the murder by hypnotizing her.
Edit - I know this is a long post, but I also thought of two 17th century examples that "kind of" fit:
In Thomas Middleton's tragicomedy The Changling, one character loses her virginity right before her wedding night and learns that her husband is going to give her a magic potion as a virginity test. After learning the side effects when taken by a virgin (IIRC laughing, feeling melancholic, and sneezing) by testing it on her maid, she then imitates those effects when she drinks the potion.
In John Marston's tragicomedy, The Malcontent, the hero (an exiled duke disguised as a court flunky) pretends to work for the scheming villain as a henchman and produces what he claims is a super-deadly and fast-acting poison, that the villain wants to use to get rid of his rivals at court so he can sieve the throne. As the hero predicted, the villain immediately tests it on him because He K Nows Too Much, and the hero pretends to die.
Edited by Hodor2 on Sep 3rd 2020 at 11:48:14 AM
Both those examples are very interesting, particularly The Malcontent.
They're both very early examples of the sort of theory of mind that I associate with the modern novel, which is usually given to start with Don Quixote in 1605. Certainly pretending to die goes back at least to the Arthur Brooke version of Romeo & Juliet.
Pretending to work for someone & finding a fake poison, however, portrays a little more of a concern for a character's internal state than I'd have expected for the time.
Great thanks for the find!
Thank you!
Your thoughts are very interesting. I definitely think you are on to something about how this trope dates from the beginning of the “scientific revolution”, because it depends on a certain amount of rationality/skepticism towards magic.
I happened to see an example of the Pretend to Be Brainwashed trope recently in a series set in feudal times, which got me thinking: I don't think they would have used that trope had the series actually been written in feudal times.
From what I understand, the theory of mind you find in the modern novel didn't exist in such a way that writers would have even considered writing a story where the interior state of someone appearing to be controlled but having secret thoughts contrary to that.
(Which is different from saying that someone is duplicitous, that of course goes back millennia)
The earliest use of the term brainwashing itself goes back only to 1950, but the idea goes back much further—The Pied Piper of Hamelin being one example of brainwashing, but not of someone pretending to be brainwashed.
What is the earliest example of this trope? Do any examples exist prior to, say, 1605?