A novel’s humane intention can be undercut by the stereotypes it dramatizes.

Evidence

The book insists that human beings are more—and more complex—than the simplified stories that are told about them. Even so, she ends up caught between the stereotypes, forced to play out an end that, it feels, might almost have been prescripted by the screenwriters of the movie her life story will surely become. No longer just a doll, at the end she appears to be an automaton fulfilling programmed instructions from the cultural zeitgeist. There is a sense that by embracing her fate, the Doll, with no way out, has finally turned into the murdering madwoman the press have invented. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s question: this is a concrete case where a book that insists on complexity ends up reproducing the very stereotype it decries — the exact contest-vs-reinforce distinction sought for Hamid and Naqvi.
• DEFINE: Gives a working definition of how contestation can fail: the author’s explicit thematic insistence is outweighed by the narrative’s structural closure into stereotype.