Marla calls Jack when she has attempted suicide, and her other cry to help is made to Jack when she thinks she has breast cancer. Marla is weak. She allows herself to be used and she also tries to commit suicide, and she even fails at that. Her opinion of herself is very low (www.garmetsigma.com/fightclub/), when Tyler rescues Marla from the hands of death she is about to fall into due to her overdose of pills she tells the ambulance workers "the girl who lives there used to be a lovely charming girl", meaning she no longer believes that she is. Also the camera zooms into a close-up of two or three remaining pills which could lead to the argument that Marla was not fully committed to the idea of killing herself if she did not finish the bottle of pills. If you look closely enough, she could even be the one who represents Jack's true self, not the ideal he creates in Tyler Durden. She is not truly a representation of a modern woman, or even of the women in Jack's life. He actually despises her, in one scene, Jack tells the viewers that "If I had a tumour, I"d name it Marla". He sees her as an intruder. This can be for a number of reasons. Marla invades his support group, forcing him to find a new release method. Secondly, she is a representation of Jack's life itself- from the inability to connect emotionally and form real relationships to a growing hatred of life. In the end, Jack realises that he is a flawed individual who wishes to move away from his Tyler Durden ideal and who finally embraces his real self, symbolised by Marla. In the end, it is realised that the complete absence of women and the feminine leads to chaos, just as in his bland life before, the absence of masculinity led to an incomplete life as well. .
The other female character, Chloe, is also a tragic character with a pitiful life. Having been told she only has a short time to live she confesses her last wish to have sex with a man before she dies, at one of her support groups (www.
