Juliet, I’m not sure I agree with your assessment of women in Fight Club. Yes, Marla seems to be an extremely weak character who lets herself be dumped upon and blamed by Tyler. Yes, she tries to commit suicide, in the very least as a “cry for help.” I would agree that she is weak. That she is a pawn in Tyler’s game. But I don’t think she is necessarily positioned as the “enemy” in this film. For sure she is Tyler’s enemy. Marla knows too much and therefore becomes a threat to Tyler’s and Project Mayhem’s society. These are the men who are so afraid of being nothing, nobodies, that they must go about reclaiming their power through violence and ego-boosting machismo. She is their enemy, but not Jack’s (Joe’s). Tyler, in the end, becomes the enemy from whom Jack needs to separate. She, like the space monkeys and Jack, represents a figure who is pulled in by Tyler’s power, the fascism of American consumerism, propaganda, and all that America stands for. She is dumped upon by Tyler, loved and then left, like society is by consumer culture and mass media. Tyler uses her and then leaves her for Jack to pick up the pieces. I’m not sure Palahnuik is blaming her, but rather is saying that she is also a victim…perhaps (and I’m just pontificating here) she knows the disillusionment the men are going through because she has gone through it as well…?
I think further proof that Marla is not the enemy is the fact that Jack (who I would argue can be separated from Tyler for these purposes although they are the same person) does not see her as a threat. Jack must “hit bottom” and stand up to his demons, namely: Tyler. In the end he finally does and takes on responsibility for his own actions. The point where he begins to diverge from Tyler’s path is when Marla is at stake (as Edward Norton says, quite insightfully I think, in his commentary on the movie).
Marla also does not fall prey to the same ambition that the men do. She is disillusioned just as Jack, but she deals with it in a different way. She shuns popular culture and the material world the same as Jack, she visits the nearly dying in order to feel relief and she is trying to hit bottom. All reactions of the humans who have lost all faith in this novel/movie. The one difference is that she is drawn to the power, but she does not try to reclaim it. Maybe because she never had it as a woman or because she has lost all hope that she will ever have the power. Marla is drawn to the power, but does not believe she can have it, which is why she loves things that were loved for a short while and then dumped an hour or a day later (like her bridesmaid dress). Marla is like the dress. She is dumped upon in relationship with Tyler. This is a woman’s role in society.