Halloween-as-Carnival

Turned up some curious photographs from pre-WWII U.S. Halloween parties...

A mask, grotesque, inhuman or caricatured, is sufficient, it seems, without any further costuming, to grant the wearer licence to disrupt and disturb the conventional order, to play with their identity, to perform as an other. Although the mournful demeanour of the female in the first image suggests she'd rather have come as something else, anything else...